


Hopeless Wanderers

by sonicSymphony



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, F/M, Gen, Humanstuck, Zombie Apocalypse, Zombiestuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-17
Updated: 2013-07-27
Packaged: 2017-12-15 05:52:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 33,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/846051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sonicSymphony/pseuds/sonicSymphony
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Since you were raised in the twenty-first century, you feel that you've come across everything zombie apocalypse themed: movies, video games, books. Though they're in the zombie genre, that's not truly what they're about. Each highlights something different, whether it's where the line is drawn between the humans and the infected as survivors lose what humanity they have left, or the glory of zombie hunting, or the deep interpersonal relationships created during such times of hardship. None of them accurately portray what it's actually like: brutal, meaningless, and, above all else, sad. There are so many metaphors and special meanings that writers use, but honestly, it's just incredibly sad.</p><p>...Though spending all of your time with Fef is definitely a plus.<br/>—————————<br/>Eridan Ampora and Feferi Peixes survive the zombie apocalypse, and despite what our narrator thinks, he is not a philosopher.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I really didn't mean to write this fic. I'm trying really hard to focus on another one that will be much bigger than this (and hopefully the first chapter of that will be out within the week) but then this hit me yesterday and wouldn't leave me alone. I was hoping it would be 3000-ish words, but now I'm not even halfway done. I'm estimating that there will be two more chapters, but there could be only one and there could be up to three. The title comes from a Mumford and Sons song (that I added an 's' to the end of).

When you wake up, something feels a bit off, and when you prop yourself up on an elbow you see your mother silhouetted in the doorway, standing there and watching you. As you aren’t very lucid at nine o’clock in the morning—especially when you’d been up until five playing Civilization—your mind doesn’t comprehend that she should be at work by now or that her posture isn’t straight and prim like it usually is but slumped and hunched. No, the only thing you’re thinking of is that you haven’t caught her peeking in on you like this since you were much younger, maybe seven or eight years old.

You groan from the annoyance at being awoken and open your mouth to complain when she releases a moan of her own and staggers forward, and that’s how you know something is completely, entirely _wrong_. 

The first thing that pops into your head is that she’s downright _drunk_ , and you stutter out, “Mom, w-what’s going on?” before she lunges for you.

Squeaking in an undignified manner, you throw up your comforter, shielding yourself from direct contact. She forces you down and the back of your skull slams into the headboard of your bed; blinking away stars, you push against her, managing to get yourself into a better, more balanced position before throwing yourself on top of her with the sheets sandwiched between you. Your mother kicks and flails at you, trying to grab onto you from under the covers all while you’re screaming, “ _What the fuck is going on mom what the fuck are you doing oh god what’s going on stop STOP!”_ in an endless stream of hysterical chatter.

Finally, you get a good grip on her, wrists clamped between your fists and your knees pinning down her thighs. Her head is above the end of the comforter, and while her face is paler than you’ve ever seen it and you can see the veins standing out, you can see her eyes, yellowing with mismatched pupils that make your stomach curl. You look for any bit of your mother in them: for her compassion, patience, loyalty, stubbornness. All you find, though, is something animalistic, violent, _hungry_ … 

Just when you think you’re going to be sick, she rears and her mouth gapes and she twists, teeth heading straight for your left wrist.

This surprises you so much that you yank back hard, and in your terrified bemusement you topple off the bed, hitting the floor with a loud _oomf_. You scramble back from the bed until you hit the wall next to your nightstand as she shakes the covers off. All you can do is watch in horror as she regains her bearings and lunges straight for you.

But suddenly you’re not just stranded in your own terror—you’re reaching for the lamp on your bedside table (it’s a hardy, wooden thing with four points at each end of the square base and a shade that’s just going to get in the way) and swinging it at your mother’s face.

As you close your eyes, there’s a sickening crunch and you feel something wet drip onto your bare stomach. Her nails reach up and scrape down each of your biceps as she tries to get a better hold on you but before she can bite you’re bringing the lamp back down, this time onto her temple and not her nose, and she’s thrown to the side while you let your own kind of madness take over and you hit her again and again and again and again and—

You think that’s enough now.

When you can bear to do anything but squint, you wish you hadn’t decided to open your eyes any further. Though your vision is a bit blurred from sleep and lack of glasses, you can see well enough to make out some detail of your mother’s smashed face. Her nose is off to the side and splattering her lips and chin with crimson blood, slightly darker than you remember blood being; the side of her head is dented inward, her temple gouged with the sharp corners of your lamp that you now throw onto the ground like it suddenly headed to a thousand degrees; if you put on your glasses, you know you’d be able to see bits of her skull in the blood that is barely beginning to dry in her hair, and perhaps even a bit of her brain ( _a lot of her brain,_ another part of you whispers, because you know how strong you are and how many times you hit), plus—

With your own fingernails digging into your thighs, you lean over and _heave_. Nothing comes up except a bit of bile since you haven’t eaten since dinner fifteen or so hours ago and all of that has already made its way through your system. Between your pathetic attempts at throwing up and coughing when you can’t, you notice that your boxer briefs are heinously wet. Once you push yourself away from your mother’s body and to the other side of the room, you take deep breaths to try and steady yourself and use the wall to get up, leaning on it as you make your way to the bathroom.

You get into the shower immediately after you turn it on, trying to snap out of whatever trance you’re in with freezing water. What happened in the bedroom has woken you up plenty so the water doesn’t really have any affect, so you just shed your underwear and toss them to the back of the tub, where they land with a _squelch_. As the water heats up, you soak your hair and reach for your shampoo and lather, rinse, and repeat before doing the same with conditioner. You do all of this with your eyes closed and convince yourself that everything is normal, but when you open your eyes and still see a bit of blood crusted on your stomach and angry red scratches down your arms, you let go any hopes of all of this being a horrible dream and reach for the body wash. 

Scrubbing yourself raw for ten minutes straight doesn’t get the disgusting feeling off of you, and you figure that’s because that sort of thing lies _under_ the skin. When the water starts to run cold, you turn it off and stand there dripping for a good while because you forgot to grab a towel. Finally, you force yourself to move, going to the other side of the room to the linen closet, leaving wet footprints behind you. Drying off quickly, you warp the towel around your hips, comb your hair, and head out.

You don’t go back to your room. You’ll need your phone and your glasses soon, you know, but you’re certainly not ready to face the carnage yet. Spending five minutes just staring at yourself in a mirror in the foyer isn’t doing you any good, since all you can do is wonder _what the_ fuck _is wrong with you, you killed your own fucking mother_ , and that isn’t very good for your psyche. Your stomach growls, but if you eat anything you know you’d throw it right back up. Instead, you think to do something that you haven’t done in a very long time: watch the news.

Everything in your home remains pristine and untouched, and you pretend not to notice little things like the rug bunched up by the garage door or your kitchen phone hanging off the wall (which you hang back up, just in case someone tries to call) so that everything remains normal in your head. The living room truly _is_ unaffected, and you plop down onto the leather sofa still dripping wet, thinking that the upholstery can go fuck itself and reach for the remote.

Every channel that isn’t a news station as emergency warning screens up, telling you to stay in your home until there’s an all clear that will never come and tune into your local news station for updates on the crisis. CNN is the least offensive news outlet, so you turn that on and there’s Carol Costello, looking harried and worn but alive. She brings you up to date: big cities like New York and Los Angeles have been quarantined, airports have been shut down so that means no flying, highways are jammed despite military blockades being set up, and the mention of the Marines going into places where important people are for rescue missions makes you think, _Dad_. As you were channel flipping, you heard a snippet of Fox News that referred to these things as “terrorists”, and you almost have to laugh. CNN is referring to them as “infected”, which you guess is a bit better, but you wonder why in all the movies and video games and books out there in recent years, it’s rare to find these things being referred to as what they have been for a long time: zombies.

When an interviewee finally _does_ do this, you almost cry right then because that means that this is real and you’re not crazy, but your relief is short lived because your mother is still dead and you’re still the one who killed her.

It’s on these thoughts that your home phone rings, the shrillness of it breaking your attention from the TV. You stretch across the couch to a side table, grabbing the wireless phone and wondering if it’s going to be someone from your dad’s base telling you they can’t fly him back from Afghanistan or the assistant manager of your mom’s store wondering why she hasn’t come in, but when you pick up and croak out a hello it’s none of those options.

“Eridan, thank God,” Fef sighs, and your heart leaps into your throat. “You weren’t answering your phone and I thought you could be _dead_ , have you turned on the TV? Do you know what’s going on? Eridan, answer me,” she demands when all she gets is silence.

You open your mouth to respond, but what comes out is a sob that nearly tears you in half, and just like that the floodgates have been unlocked, your chest is heaving, and you _cry_ , you cry like you’ve never cried before and she just listens to you, murmuring comforting words and talking small breaks to give instructions to the butler in the background.

This is how it begins.

* * *

 

Three hours later, you’ve managed to creep back into your room and grab your phone, glasses, and laptop, get crates out of your airplane hangar sized garage (your dad is a car collector) and fill them with all the food you have, load them into your Cadillac Escalade, grab all of the weapons and ammunition in your dad’s gun locker, empty your closet without looking at your mother, break into your dad’s office and take anything that looks like it could help, raid the medicine cabinet and make sure you’ve grabbed both bottles of your anxiety meds, and nab a few family photos off the wall. It was a short amount of time to do all of that shit, and you’re pretty proud of yourself. After talking/sobbing to Fef, you’ve worked out that her house is safest, since it’s on forty acres of property and a mile away from any actual roads. Though it isn’t gated and doesn’t have its own armory, it’s better than your house that’s just barely outside of Jacksonville, seeing as hers is further from the city.

When you enter the garage for the final time, you stop to take a look at all the cars. You feel a small pang of regret that you can’t take any of them with you—especially the Corvette Stingrays, one a ’63 and the other a ‘14, which you’ve always wanted to drive but your dad said you couldn’t until you got a college degree. You’ve admired them since you were three, and they would be your reward once you graduated.

You’ll never get them now, however. You’re sure to lock the garage up so no one can get in, just in case you come back.

One thing that rubs you the wrong way is the absence of your mother’s BMW. She should’ve been on her way to her shop and was probably almost there when… shit went down, so that would mean she’d found her way back home. Back to you. 

On that somber/perplexing note, you head back into the house for the final time to grab your laptop bag and keys.

Leaving your home behind is harder than you thought it would be. You’ve spent most of your life here, though you’ve only been back for about two weeks since you just finished your freshman year of college, and at least when you left for Yale you knew you’d be coming back. There’s no such delusion this time.

You spend the drive focusing on trying to think more clearly, with less run on sentences and more lucidity. Fef’s expecting you to be at the top of your game, and you’re going to have to be a tad calmer if you want to protect her. A saner area of your mind tells you to get out of this overdrive mode and reasons that Feferi Peixes is an incredibly capable girl— _woman_ , now—that is perfectly able to take care of herself (and you), but there are only three people in this world that you love, and one of them is dead in your bedroom and the other is god knows where, so she’s the only thing you have left to cling to.

This “thinking clearly” thing isn’t really working all that much.

Highways have been turned into parking lots that the police are desperately trying to clear, so you take some back roads that spin you around so badly that you have to dig your GPS out of the center console to bring you to the Peixes estate. It takes you almost two hours to go twenty miles, and surprisingly you only run into one zombie on the way; it’s just standing there, slouching in the middle of the road, and you drive just to the left of it so that when you pass it, you can easily open your door and slam the damn thing to the pavement.

The driveway of the estate is long and winding, taking you under an oak tree canopy dripping with Spanish moss that is kept immaculate by a staff of gardeners that could be dead right now. It’s silent except for the cicadas, which buzz annoyingly even when the entire world is falling apart. You’d turned off the radio a while back, since it was just telling you the same things over and over again with no real updates, and all it was doing was getting on your nerves.

When you finally make it to the house, you’re surprised to see that the side driveway for the servants is vacant, meaning that all of them abandoned this place. It makes you irrationally angry—they worked for Fef’s family, their loyalty was to _them_ —but then you realize that Fef probably sent them away. It’s the kind of thing she’d do.

She sees you pull up, and she’s out the front door in an instant, running towards you. You reach out for a hug, but she grabs your shoulders first, inspecting you from head to toe and pulling on your scarf before embracing you tightly. Your waiting arms wrap around her in return, and it’s more comforting than she could ever know to just have her here, feeling the heat of her skin on yours and matching your breathing to fit the rise and fall of her chest. You almost start crying all over again.

It’s a long time before she pulls away, stepping back and grabbing both of your hands. “You really need to stop wearing scarves during Florida summers; you’ll get heatstroke.” When you don’t respond, she squeezes your hands and says, "Let’s unload the car. Bring all the food into the kitchen, plus what guns you brought. I take it you have an entire arsenal’s worth.”

You nod and get to work. Food comes out first because you worry that it could spoil in the heat, and next comes the weapons. Half an hour later you’re sitting at the bar with a glass of orange juice, sipping on it periodically as Fef explains her plan. It goes as you thought it would: board up the windows, bring everything that you need upstairs, get some ladders and wreck the staircases, and a whole bunch of miscellaneous other duties that you’ll have to accomplish. It’s going to be a lot of work to make this house into something you can live in safely for months, maybe even years.

She’s nattering on about getting to Home Depot to get some boards and maybe even some fencing when she just stops, sighing and sliding her stool closer to yours. She puts her hand on your knee and asks quietly, “Have you talked to your dad?”

“No,” you say quietly. “I heard that Marines are trying to do some rescue stuff, but he’s supposed to be in the Mid East. Now…” Military airports don’t shut down in some cases, but you don’t know what this qualifies as. “I don’t know, Fef. I called him on the way here, but there was no answer.”

“I haven’t heard from Cordelia, either,” she admits. Fef has referred to her mother by her first name since middle school, seeing as the person who gave birth to her has never acted like a mother; it was always a rotating crew of nannies, and your mother on the breaks in between them. “Who knows, I could be the new owner of a multi billion dollar company right now!"

For some reason, you both find this incredibly funny even though her mother’s death isn’t really a happy subject, and you find yourself laughing harder than you’ve laughed in a long time and when you try to take a sip of your drink to calm down, you end up snorting it out. But all of this is okay, because Fef is clutching at your shoulder and doubled over, cackling like a maniac. 

It doesn’t take you very long to come to the conclusion that you’re both going to go completely insane. 

* * *

 

Because the pandemic isn’t as bad in Jacksonville and the areas stretching up to Wilmington as it is on the rest of the east coast, you and Fef decide that it’d be best just to wait it out for a while instead of making supply runs immediately. You fill all of the bathtubs with water, organize the food into piles by expiration date, and catalogue every weapon and box of ammunition, leaving a rifle and two hundred rounds in the car since you’ve got tons of other guns. Fef gets a Glock to wear on her hip while you take one of your dad’s old joint combat pistols. While you’re used to shooting rifles, you’re a decent shot with this old thing too.

It turns out that you don’t have to get boards after all—Cordelia decided to invest in accordion hurricane shutters that have been built into the house in such a way that they weren’t visible to any onlookers. Fef remembered them when you were digging around in the garage for plywood and such; they hadn’t used them since the 90’s, but apparently they’ve had some maintenance over the years or they’d be rusted shut. After ten minutes of fiddling, you manage to seal every window in the house. You’ve got a few beams to nail over the doors for extra safety, but even without them you feel secure.

All the while, you have the radio blasting. It had annoyed you on your trip there, but it seems to give Feferi some solace, so you let it blare. Four hours after you arrive, they announce that Jacksonville has been shut down and quarantined just like the larger, more famous cities, and with that comes the end of the hope that you’re going to go home any time soon.

Following that somber declaration come guests: local professors and scientists that are trying to work out what’s going on. It seems that no one knows where this thing came from; some of the “experts” that are interviewed estimate that it began somewhere in eastern Asia—most likely China or Japan—and quickly hit the airports and travelled outward from there (the Beijing airport has around 700 flights in and out a day, and you don’t know if that’s just passenger or if they’re counting cargo too, but either way that’s a lot of opportunity for the spread of a disease). Everyone on air seems to disagree about something, whether it’s the starting point or the side effects or the rate of infection. One thing, however, they all have in common: they refuse to call the infected “zombies”. 

Now that you think about it, they’re not really zombies either; they’re _people_. Sure, they’d changed and lost most of their humanity, but if your mother could figure out how to get back to your house then there must be _something_ left of them. If there’s any hope of some sort of cure for whatever the fuck this is, that means that they have to be considered _people_ , people that can still be _saved_. The nightmare’s just begun, so there’s a lot to figure out before the super geniuses can even try to find a cure, and by the time enough data has been collected, a huge portion of the would could be _dead_. The lucid population may not be enough to save the diseased.

You shake your head to clear it of an oncoming existential crisis. 

Fef comes over and sits by you at the bar, where you were staring balefully at the radio. She puts her hand over yours, which is balled up in a fit on the counter, and rubs a thumb over your knuckles. “We should move your car into the garage, maybe put some water and food in there,” she proposes. “Just in case we get overrun by infected.” 

“Zombies, Fef,” you sigh. “Just call them zombies.” 

“I’ll call them whatever the glubbity fuck I want to call them!” she exclaims, mock offended. “No matter what my point still stands!”

“Yeah,” you concede. “It’s almost nighttime so I’ll bring a couple of gallons of water out and we can move a bit of food in tomorrow.” The garage has its own building, and you have to go about thirty feet with no cover to get to it. You watch as the digital clock on the oven ticks to 8:01 and sigh, standing up.

Just when you’re about to head out, Fef calls you back with a soft, “Hey,” and when you turn around, she hugs you. With her head nuzzling into your neck, you remember elementary school where she was taller than you by a good three inches or so and you thought you’d never catch up until middle school when it actually happened. You didn’t actually outgrow her until late high school, though, and now you’ve got a few inches on her. It’s one of your best accomplishments, especially since now you can pillow your cheek on her hair. It’s one of the best feelings in the world.

“Be careful, okay?” she says. “We didn’t see anything earlier, but that doesn’t mean things aren’t out there. Don’t the movies say night is when they’re around the most?” You nod, and she releases you. “I’ll open the garage.”

With that, you grab two gallons of water off the counter and head outside, jogging quickly to your SUV. Once you’re in with the doors locked, you see the garage door start to open. You turn it on and it starts easily, and moments later you’re turning it off and hopping out, your destination reached. Fef closes the door behind you, but when you get halfway to the house, you hear something. 

That “something” is a faint rustling noise that came from the canopy of trees on the left side of the driveway, and your reflexes have you spinning around and pulling your pistol before your mind can catch up. You keep your eyes on the brush, waiting for something to appear from behind a tree or some of the shrubbery closer to the house, but nothing emerges, and you don’t hear any more noises. Perhaps you were just imagining it, or maybe it was a raccoon that already fled. Hell, you’re probably being paranoid. 

Even though you think it several times, you can’t seem to believe it. After a minute of silence, you head inside, giving a weak smile to Fef, who’s watching you from the doorway. “What did you hear?” she asks the second you’re inside. She seems more worried than you believed she would be, hands kneading together and expression anxious. 

“Just a little bit of rustling,” you report. “It was probably nothing, maybe an armadillo or something. Seemed kind of small.”

She swallows, taking a deep breath. “I didn’t notice how late it was.”

“No, Fef, it’s fine,” you interrupt, crossing your arms over your chest. “Nothing happened while I was out, it’s calm out there.”

“That’s…” she trails off, looking a bit guilty, “not exactly what I was worrying about. Mr. Kendall was supposed to call me two hours ago with an update.” That’s her butler, the guy in charge of managing the estate when Cordelia wasn’t home. “You know we don’t have cell service out here so he would’ve called the home phone, and it didn’t ring all day. I thought we could’ve missed his call since we were outside for a while, but I picked the phone up and there’s no dial tone.”

You frown, thrown for a bit of a loop. “Did you check if the TV is still working?”

“I did!” she affirms. “It’s still working fine, so I don’t know what could be going wrong.”

Before you can answer, Fef grabs your arm, staring at something off to the side. She shifts a bit like she’s going to walk towards whatever it is, but she stays by your side. “Did you see that?”

“See what?” You turn, looking down the hallway to the foyer near the front door. Your lips part, mouth going dry as the lights in the hall and dining room go out to match those of the entryway. Two seconds later, the lights above you blink off, leaving you and Fef in darkness.

The windows are sealed with shutters and there’s no light, so it’s pitch black. “There’s a flashlight under then sink,” Fef says, voice shaking, and she pulls you around the bar with her, feeling her way over to the correct spot. You yelp when you stub your toe on the corner of the wall, and that’s when she lets go and kneels on the floor a few steps in front of you. You can’t see, but you can hear her rummaging around in the cabinet until she makes a relieved noise and a flashlight flicks on.

“If that was just the power going out,” you hold out a hand so help her up as she speaks, “it wouldn’t have phased out like that. It would’ve been all at once." 

“Your circuit breaker,” it dawns on you. “Is it in the garage?”

Fef’s mouth opens as if she’s going to say something, but she swallows a few times before she speaks. “Eridan I wasn’t watching you the whole time when you went out, I’m sorry. When I went to check the phone, I had to leave for maybe thirty seconds. Something… something could’ve gotten into the garage. One of the infected—” 

“They can’t switch off a circuit breaker deliberately, Fef, they don’t work like that,” you interrupt apprehensively, starting to feel nauseous. Not wanting to throw up like you did earlier, you grab her hand for the reassurance and pull out your gun with the other. “Oh god, something’s wrong, something’s _really_ wrong.” 

“Hush,” she sooths quietly, a note of hysteria coloring her tone as well. “We don’t know—”

**_BAM!_ **

_“What the fuck was that?”_ you question shrilly, fists clenching automatically. Fef squeezes harder too, and there’s another bang outside. 

“Someone’s trying to damage the garage door,” Fef proposes, voice shaky. “What if it _is_ one of them?”

You gulp, raising the gun a little bit. “I’ll shoot its brains out.” 

Fef palms her glock with her free hand, and since you’re a lefty and she’s a righty you can keep your grips on each other while having your dominant hands free. With a loud screech, the garage door finally gives way. You hear it fall to the pavement, and then someone shouts words that you can’t make out. The reply is faint.

“They’re speaking,” Fef whispers. “It’s _people_.”

It takes every ounce of self-control for you not to be chanting _oh god, oh god, oh god_ , and you’re glad that she doesn’t mention how badly you’re trembling. Honestly, if you had the opportunity to shoot, you’d probably miss. Taking a deep breath doesn’t help much, but you still have to say, “Let’s go to the third floor and see if we can get a visual.”

You both head upstairs, trying to be as quiet as possible and clinging to each other’s hands for dear life. When you reach the top of the second staircase, something rams into the front door. Fef jolts and you nearly scream, and then after a mutual “fuck noise” decision, you’re running up the stairs.

The banging is repetitive now, and it’s getting fainter as you move up but it’s still fucking loud, like there’s an elephant charging into the door and when you reach the final floor of the house, Fef pulls you into her bedroom and closes the door as soon as the people downstairs break through. She shines her light around, trying to determine where to hide when you find your balls. “I can shoot them from the railing.”

“Eridan, don’t be stupid,” she admonishes, pulling you towards the closet. “Maybe you could hit them if you had a rifle, _but they’re all downstairs with the people who just broke into the fucking house!"_  

“Let me try,” you plead, trying to let go of her hand. She keeps her grip tight, and you won’t be able to escape unless she consents to it. “Fef, please, they’re just going to find us, have you ever watched a horror movie?” 

Fef huffs like she’s so fucking _done_ with you and exclaims, “Yes I have, and that’s why I’m not going to let you go out there!” 

“Maybe they’re friendly.”

“Would _you_ be fucking friendly?”

Honestly? No. “That’s not the point, Fef—”

The door bangs open and a woman stands in the doorway, tall and stocky with a sawed-off shotgun trained on you. You’d raised your own weapon out of reflex when the door first flew open, and now you’re at some sort of stalemate. “Found ‘em!” the woman yells, not taking her eyes off of you. “It’s two kids!” 

“Get the fuck out of our house,” you demand, snarling.

“Are there any more of you?” she questions as you hear more feet pounding up the stairs.

“Tons,” you bluff, “and they’re going to come up and kill all of you and fuck your bodies. I will tell you one more time, _get the fuck out_.”

There’s a laugh from behind her, and a man steps up, skinny and short and a redneck. He’s got a hunting rifle strapped to his back and is standing there like he doesn’t have a care in the world. “Listen to this fucking kid, Lois, he’s _hilarious_. I know his type.” He steps around the woman in the doorway and looks you up and down like you’re a buck he just shot. “Preppy little bitch, never shot a gun in his life, probably relied on mummy and daddy for every little thing. He probably doesn’t even know how to turn the safety on that pistol off.”

You bark a laugh, and Fef knows what you’re going to do so she grabs your shirt to pull you back, but you’re saying, “The safety’s already off,” and pulling the trigger.

The shot’s a bit off because your hands are still shaking, but the bullet goes through his neck and the dumbass chokes and falls to the floor. Fef screams and yanks you out of the way of the shotgun bullets that are sure to come, but there’s no shot and after a few seconds of heavy breathing and staring at the woman in the doorway, the stranger shrugs and says, “Great, more food for me.” With a motion with her gun, she says, “Now come on downstairs, kids, no one else has to get hurt.” 

“What, afraid I’ll shoot more of you?” you question arrogantly.

Lois rolls her eyes and says, “I’d be careful if I were you, trigger happy isn’t a good thing to be,” and leaves, assuming you’ll follow after a bit of squabbling. Hell, that’s what _you_ think will happen.

After a beat of silence, Fef pushes you towards the window. “We can get on the roof and climb down the trellis near the right side of the house,” she whispers. “You still have your keys, right?”

“Yeah,” you answer, feeling a bit numb.

She opens with window, and you guess she opens it a lot because there’s almost no noise. There’s a latch for the hurricane shutters on the inside as well as the outside, so she gets them off with little trouble, albeit more noisily. You watch her swing out and onto the roof like she’s done it a thousand times before, and you follow, sealing everything up behind you.

“The trellis is right here,” she says, going to stand at the edge of the roof. “You know Cordelia only gets the good stuff, so it’s not going to break. I’ve climbed it before. Just be careful, and come down like ten seconds after me so there’s not too much weight in one spot. It’s kind of hard to get purchase on it with your feet and you’re going to scratch up your knuckles, but it’ll be fine.”

You nod and off she goes, scaling down the wall with ease and grace. That’s how she does everything, you think, and after you watch for a few seconds, you’re following her down.

A minute later, you’re both on the ground and edging along the outside of the house. You can’t hear anyone talking through the walls, but somehow you just know they’re in there. Once you make it to the far side of the house closest to the garage, Fef stops, and you pull up short behind her. “One of them is standing at the side door,” she murmurs.

Since you can’t see through walls, you take her word for it. “Should we run for the car?” you ask, even though you really don’t want to abandon the house with all the weapons and food and safety.

Well, you guess it’s not _that_ safe, if raiders could take it this quickly.

“On three,” she breathes so low that you can barely hear her. “One… two…”

When three hits, you both rocket off, sprinting for the garage. One of the two large doors is on the ground, crumpled like it got hit repeatedly with a truck, but at least that means you don’t have to waste time punching in the passcode. It’s also out of the way enough that you should be able to pull out. While for the first few seconds you run with blind terror, the fog starts to lift when you realize that nothing is happening. Did they not realize what you’re doing? Do they not _care_?

Halfway there, you stop and turn around. Fef doesn’t notice and keeps running, but you raise your gun at the person standing in the doorway, who’s looking right at you. “I’m going to ask you politely, now,” you call to him, hands no longer shaking. The surge of confidence is driving you, making your aim steady and gaze clear. You hear Fef stop behind you, and you’re sure that she’s looking at you with some kind of disapproval (you underestimated the amount of displeasure; she’s actually looking at you like you’re the biggest dumbass on the planet). “Will you _please_ get out of our house?”

Then you’re on the ground. You don’t know how you got there.

Lifting your head up and trying to hear past the ringing in your ears, you realize belatedly that Feferi had screamed. Now she’s crouching down next to you, cursing rapidly with her hands fluttering over your body like she’s not sure if she should touch you. Just when you’re about to open your mouth and ask what’s wrong, the _pain_ hits, and you try not to shout. Instead you just make a pathetic strangled sound.

“Your little boyfriend is going to get you killed, girl,” the man from the doorway says, and he sounds remarkably kind for someone who just shot you. “I’d leave him if I were you, but it’s your call. I didn’t come here to kill nobody. Just go and don’t turn back.” 

You don’t see Fef give any sense of affirmation, since your face is turned to the side and you can barely even see the man in the doorway, but she grabs your gun from the pavement, clicking on the safety and shoving it into your pocket before getting in front of you and lifting. The pain spikes, and you can’t help but cry out, your left hand flailing out to try and shove her away. It’s a bad reaction, since you know you need her help, but you couldn’t restrain yourself. “Calm down, Eridan,” she says soothingly, running a hand through your hair. “Come on, it’s a shoulder wound, you can get up and I’ll help you every step of the way.”

 _I don’t think I can_ , you think but don’t say, instead stating the obvious with the wonderful line, “He _shot_ me.” Fef looks at you like you’ve achieved the maximum level of dipshit. Taking a deep, shuddering breath, you reach with your good arm and latch onto her bicep. She clasps onto you in kind and her other arm goes under your good shoulder and she lifts.

Somehow, you manage to get your feet back under you and then she’s leading you to the garage. “Give me your keys and I’ll drive. Do you have a first aid kit?”

“Glove compartment,” you say as she searches in your pocket for your keys. She pulls them out, victorious, and dashes to the driver’s side door. You walk more slowly, in a bit of a haze, and when you get into the car she’s leaning over, digging in your glove compartment. Once you’re in, she tosses a bunch of napkins in your lap with a comment to stop the bleeding, and takes the first aid kit out and tosses it to the ground by your feet. Finally, she starts the car and pulls out, careful to avoid the fallen garage door. 

She doesn’t sacrifice time to adjust the seat or mirrors; she just drives. Once you’re out of sight of the house, everything seems a hell of a lot calmer even though your napkins are already soaked. All of your clothes are still in the back, on top of the folded up seats, so you manage to reach back and grab a scarf to add to the pile. 

You only encounter one zombie on the driveway, and it is Fef’s first. She doesn’t seem affected by it as she rolls down the window and leans out, pulling her gun and firing. The bullet goes straight through its kneecap, and it falls to the ground, withering. Fef slides back into her seat, rolling up the window while taking back control of the wheel. A few seconds later, you feel the car go over the thing’s head with a _squelch_.

…And people wonder why you’re in love with this girl.

When the street comes into view, Fef stops the car. She takes a few deep breaths, closing her eyes to steady herself before slamming her hands down on the steering wheel. You jump at the sudden movement as she turns her livid gaze on you, snarling, “What the everloving _fuck_ were you thinking?! Are you fucking _stupid_? We didn’t know how many there were, they were better armed, they had the house and you decide that you’re in a position to bargain?! The only reason you’re not dead is because the guy in the doorway thought you were too dumb to die! Do you understand? _Do you fucking understand what you just did_? That wasn’t brave or heroic, that was _stupid_.” She breaks off to wipe her eyes with the heel of her hand. “God I shouldn’t be yelling, I think you’re going into shock, but _goddammit_ Eridan, never do anything like that again!”

You clamp down on your lip with your teeth to keep it from trembling. You think about telling her that it took _forever_ to realize that you were shot and even longer to figure out _where_ , because she might find that funny and you want her to stop being mad at you, but all you can do is nod. (That was kind of a bad idea, as nodding just made you dizzier.) With a huff, Fef leans down, grabbing the first aid kit from near your feet and unzipping it to examine its contents. Your dad had put it together for you right after you got your car, since he said anything could happen while driving, and he had a friend in high school that saved someone’s life with his kit, though knowing your dad that story was a bit exaggerated.

“I’ve been trying to make you act like yourself all day, and yet the only time I see _you_ is when you’re making a really bad decision,” she notes almost conversationally. Seeing as she’d been screaming her throat raw a few seconds ago, the shift to a nonchalant tone jars you almost more than the tirade did. “Anyway, we’ve got some gauze and bandages, but we’re going to need more. The Tylenol’s a month away from expiring, but it should be fine. Hydrogen peroxide, alcohol wipes, adhesive tape… you keep this decently stocked, good.”

“My dad put it together,” you say, and she pats your knee.

“Should we wait until the bleeding stops to treat it, or do it now where we know we’re relatively safe?” Fef asks, and you think she’s talking to herself more than you until she says, “It’s your call.”

Despite how much you really want to put this off, you swallow and say, “Now.”

Fef turns off the car and makes sure it’s locked before climbing into the back seat, shoving your clothes aside and telling you to follow. The seats are all folded up so the area is raised up reasonably flat, and you both situate yourselves with you legs crossed under you with the first aid kit in the middle. Carefully, you peel off the scarf and napkin combo, wincing as the blood clot is tugged and a steady trickle starts back down your chest. 

Looking at it clearly for the first time, you feel like you’re going to be sick. The tank top you’re wearing does little to cover the injury, which is deeper than the average graze. You can see tissue and muscle and a little bit of bone from your clavicle and—

Frenzied, you lunge at the door, unlock it, and throw up noisily onto the ground. None of it gets in the car, which is good, and Fef grabs your glasses when they almost fall off your face. She strokes your back and mumbles encouragements as you empty your stomach. When you think you’re done, Fef proposes cheerily, “Since you’re already leaning out the door, let me pour some hydrogen peroxide on it.”

Groaning, you listen as she unscrews the bottle and takes a little sniff. “Smells sharp,” she comments, and that’s all the warning you get before she’s crawling over and dumping the entire bottle out in an attempt to kill you.

Well, you guess that’s a bit melodramatic. Fef is actually just pouring out a little bit as not to waste a bunch, but it still stings. Actually, it isn’t _that_ bad; the pain just got worse than it was, which was already enough to bring you to your knees. It starts to bubble, and that’s how you’re supposed to know it’s working but it just makes your stomach churn even more.

“There,” Fef says and stops pouring. She comes back with a small hand towel you’d taken out of the linen closet back at your house and you close the car door and relock it. Moving into a more comfortable position, you hunker down as she blots around the edges of the graze. It’s still bleeding, but less so than it was earlier so hopefully it’ll stop now. “It’s deep,” she notes. “I think it got a bit of your deltoid, maybe it just nicked your collar bone. How badly does it hurt?”

“A lot,” you say distantly.

She cranes her neck to kiss your cheek. “I’m sorry I yelled earlier, I was just worried about you. And you were stupid.”

You don’t say anything to that. She gives you two Tylenol that you take dry, and tries to get the wound as clean as possible before applying some triple antibiotic, stuffing it with sterile gauze, and bandaging it with a lopsided square of fabric, held to you with medical tape. “If you move the shoulder too much, I’ll have to do a bandage that wraps around your shoulder and your chest to make it stable,” she warns.

Getting the message, you heed her warning and are careful not to jolt it while you move back to the passenger seat. You’d offer to drive but you doubt she’d let you (it's like she doesn't remember that it’s _your car_ ), and she moves back up after you. This time, she adjusts her seat so she doesn’t have to sit far up to reach the pedals and changes the height of steering wheel so she’s more comfortable. After adjusting her mirrors, she settles in and starts the car.

At that exact moment, it hits both of you that you have no idea where to go. Jacksonville’s closed, the highway’s probably still a parking lot, and your families are either dead or MIA. You know Fef has a distant uncle in Washington and your cousin Cronus was shacked up in Vegas when you heard from him a few months ago, but god knows where he is now. If they’re alive, they’d be thousands of miles away, and there’s no way you’d make it to the west coast. One thing’s for sure, though: you can’t stay here. 

“Rural’s better during a zombie apocalypse, right?” Fef inquires, almost timid. “Does that mean we should head west?”

With a tired smile, you say, “You finally called it what it is.”

She laughs a little bit, but her heart isn’t in it. “Yeah, I guess I did. Can’t really deny it now that I’ve killed one.”

“That was the most beautiful maneuver I’ve seen all day,” you compliment, and you swear her cheeks turn red. “Let’s turn on the GPS, find some back roads. I…” A hysterical laugh bursts out of you before you can stop it. “Fef, I really don’t know what to do. I wish I did, but I don’t.”

“We’re both lost, then,” she says, reaching over to power on the GPS. It boots up quickly and connects to a satellite, which relieves you despite knowing it shouldn’t have been affected. “Should we try and get gas before we leave? There’s a station right up the road.”

According to the gauge, there’s a little bit over half a gallon of gas in the tank. Since you drive a hybrid, you get about 20 mpg, and it’s charged up pretty well so you’re good on electricity. Seeing as you have no idea where you’re heading, you should probably get some. Plus, find some containers (you think you’ve got a couple of empty soda bottles under the seats) to fill up too. 

“Yeah, let’s head over there, but first…” You climb back into the back again, wary of your shoulder that’s still screaming at you, and rummage around until you find the rifle that you left as a ‘just in case’ weapon. It’s already loaded, but you’ve got a full box of ammo for it as well. You make sure the safety is on and go back to your seat. “Ready.”

“Please don’t shoot anyone else today, if you can help it,” Fef says dryly before setting off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Will Eridan and Feferi fill up the car without hinderance? Will they ever figure out where to go and find a place to call home? Will Eridan ever realize that he's being a dumbass? Will they have 'it's-the-end-of-the-world-fuck-it' sex in the backseat (even though they're not even dating, gasp)? When will all the other characters listed (and more) show up? Perhaps all of these sarcastic rhetorical questions will be answered in the next chapter!
> 
> I really hope you're enjoying thus far, and if you have any questions you can find me at redweddingcrashers.tumblr.com!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, a new chapter already! I'm writing this as fast as I can because I need to get it out of my head, since I really shouldn't be working on this at all. The next update will probably be slower, but expect it within the next few days.

The drive to the gas station happens without hindrance. You don’t see another soul, healthy or otherwise, and you’re starting to think that there may be something other than luck on your side. Though the lack of activity _should_ be comforting, it isn’t. Right now, you’d rather have a horde on your hands than silence; it’s fuckin _unnerving_. After the chaos at Fef’s house, you’d think the sudden quiet would be enjoyed, but honestly it’s just making you edgier. Fef seems to be a bit off too, as she doesn’t immediately get out of the car when she pulls up to a pump.

You scope out the area: it seems that there’s no one here. The lights are on in Flash Foods, but you won’t have to go in there immediately because you both have credit cards and can pay at the pump. Going inside _will_ be a thing you have to do, though, because you could use some of the other stuff that’s in there, like food, containers for more gas, extra first aid stuff and pills for different aliments…

Oh shit, _your_ medication.

Opening the glove compartment startles Fef, and you don’t apologize because you’re kind of starting to freak out a little. Unzipping the first aid kit and digging through it, you do manage to find two of your Ativan (you had more of them in the kit when you first got on the pills, but they’re gone because sometimes you forget to take your dosage and use the extras that are in there—hell, that’s what they are _there_ for). You shake them out of the ziplock bag and onto your palm, thinking that a zombie apocalypse is the _worst possible time_ to run out of anti-anxiety meds.

Of course, you hadn’t been out ten minutes ago. Your prescription is back at the house full of raiders.

“ _Fuck_ ,” you groan, slumping back to hit the seat. “Well isn’t this just _great_.” 

Fef leans over and pats your leg comfortingly. “Weren’t they going to try and wean you off it anyway?” she asks, trying to find the silver lining of the situation, as per usual. “I don’t thing Ativan is a drug that’s meant to be used for extended periods of time.”

With a sigh, you dump the tablets back into the small baggy and zip the kit back up. You’ll save them for when you really need them. “Yeah, I guess.”

Once the first aid kit is locked safely away in the glove compartment, you grab your rifle and unlock your car door, telling Fef to wait a minute so you can check out the area. She rolls her eyes at you, taking out her glock and getting out of the car. 

As she scans her credit card and selects the gasoline type, you scope out the perimeter, safety off and finger lying just outside of the trigger guard. Since the gas station is on the outskirts of the city limits and in one of the most rural areas of the county, there aren’t many people in the area for the gas station to serve; the only reason there’s a station on this road is because of all the _money_ in the area (the Peixeses aren’t the only ones in a ten mile radius that are rolling in dough), as well as a popular boat ramp at the end of the road that launches into a tributary to the St. John’s River. That means that not a lot of people have been here lately, and therefore the zombie population should be low.

You only take a quick look around back because you don’t want to leave Fef without backup, but you don’t see anything that could help or hinder you. After making sure that there aren’t any zombies or useful items in the dumpsters at the side of the building, you head back to the pump. You wait as she finishes filling up the car, having decided that you’ll raid the store together. She puts the nozzle away when it clicks before heading towards the building with you.

All of the lights inside are on, leading you to believe that the establishment is open even though you don’t see any employees. You’re very careful with the door—if it’s locked and you have to break your way in, you’ll have to deal with alarms—but it turns out that it’s unlocked, just waiting to be opened.

The second you step inside, you know something’s wrong by the bloodstains on the wall behind the counter. It’s a splatter formation, like something got shot back there. You start to approach, but Fef holds her arm out, stopping you in your tracks. Shaking her head, she tiptoes up to the check out area instead and leans over, keeping her gun trained down over the counter. When she bends far enough to see over, her face falls. “Suicide,” she says softly. 

You walk up behind her, gun still at the ready, and take a look for yourself. It looks like the kid took the shotgun they keep under the counter for robber protection and destroyed his face with it. Through all the blood, you recognize his hair color—the redhead had worked here for years, and since you and Fef were regular customers, you sort of knew him. You think his name was Finn.

“Fred,” Fef says sadly, and you mentally go, _oops_. Before you can mention it, Fef hops onto the counter, lying on her stomach so she can reach down and grab the shotgun. When she pops back up, she reports, “I didn’t see any ammunition under the counter. I think what’s in the gun is it.”

Resigning yourself to check again when she isn’t looking, Fef puts away her glock and holds onto the rifle one handed, like you’re doing. “Come on, let’s grab some food first.” 

There’s an aisle full of canned stuff, easy mac, and chips; you take all of it, and raid the candy section next. You fill coolers with water and energy drinks, plus a few sodas for a low blood sugar remedy that will probably taste horrible once they get warm and flat. It takes you nearly half an hour to get food and water needs taken care of, and next you grab tons of medication, taking multiple packs of everything and ransacking the first aid section. You have a feeling you’re going to need a lot of gauze before your bullet wound heals up. 

It’s past dusk when you start loading up on miscellaneous items, like tin foil, blankets, lighters, matches, flashlights, and batteries. You look away when you notice Fef carrying an armful of tampon boxes, and you don’t see her stick her tongue out at you for being a weenie. A few seconds later, you come out of the store with ten rolls of duct tape up each arm and a pack of condoms shoved deep into your pocket so _you_ won’t get embarrassed. Tons of other shit is added to the pile in the back of your SUV, and once you find a spot for the night you figure you’ll catalogue it all. Honestly, you’ll probably never end up doing that, though it would be the responsible thing to do.

You finish off the pile with some random tools and toilet paper. Fef’s still in the store, and she comes out carrying a shovel and two sharp looking pitchforks. “Think I can learn to dual wield?” she asks cheerily.

“I’d love to see it,” you respond with a laugh before heading back inside together to grab some of the empty gas containers. They’re the red plastic ones that you have tons of in your garage, but seeing as those aren’t exactly on hand you’re fine with having to steal some. There are two five gallon, four two and a half gallon, and three one gallon tanks. That’s twenty-three gallons total.

…You have a 25-gallon tank. That’s not even enough to fill it.

Seeing as you’re environmentally conscious, however, you’d talked your dad into getting you a hybrid. That means it also runs on electricity, but relying on that alone won’t get you very far. With what you have, you can probably get as far west as Texas, but no further unless you can find another gas station. You estimate that most areas will be out of fuel within the week.

Once you’ve got the newly filled canisters in the back of the SUV, Fef heads inside one more time to pee. You’ll use the restroom after her, but since someone has to watch the car, you bounce on the balls of your feet impatiently until you hear her scream.

You’re sprinting into the building before you fully realize what’s happening, cocking your gun and getting it ready. By the time you get there, panting and frenzied, Fef is trying to get one of her pitchforks out of a zombie’s skull. It’s another one of the workers—you can tell by the red vest—and you’re about to shoot it for good measure when she says, “The gunshot could attract the one that bit this guy. Go back to the car.”

Stepping over the body, you wrap your arms around her, not caring that it pulls at your shoulder wound. “We should stay together,” you say into her hair.

Though your voice is muffled, she understands you fine. “Eridan, I know you want to shelter me, but I can take care of myself just fine. You’ve seen that. Mutual protection is going to be a thing from now on, but since I know there aren’t any more zombies in this bathroom I am going to fucking pee and you are going to make sure no one steals the car. Okay?”

When you can’t find anything to say against her, you give. “Okay,” you agree and head back to the SUV.

“Your turn!” she calls a few minutes later, and you use the women’s room because you know it’s, as she pointed out earlier, zombie-free. Soon, you’re pulling out of the gas station. The dashboard clock ticks to 9:23pm.

I-10 is the highway that goes west, but you can’t take that; the GPS says that traffic is still incredibly backed up. The sensors that report traffic information along the road will probably stop working soon, as they require manual input, and maybe this information isn’t even accurate. You wonder what the city is like now—if it’s a cesspool of the living dead or if it got lost to gangs and military or what. You’re south of the city now, and Fef decides that you should take State Road 16 west, and this is when you finally start seeing people with their cars packed with shit like yours is. They all must be locals with sense, as they’re avoiding I-95 and the I-295 beltway, though the radio reports that the military shut down I-95.

That’s when you start to see zombies. No one really pays any attention to them as long as they’re not in the road (not many are). Most are shambling on the sides of the pavement, closer to the tree line than the road, and luckily no one on 16 is dumb enough to use them as target practice. You wonder who they were and how they got here, on a small road in the middle of nowhere, and ruminate over who was the first to come and infect everyone, leading to all of this bullshit. There aren’t many buildings, the only ones you pass being small farms with tractors and trucks blocking the driveways and no animals in sight. You’d started counting the undead, and by the time you’re within five miles of the nearest town, you’ve seen sixteen.

As you head towards Starke, the road stays lined by trees, but as you get closer to the little dot on the map, you start to feel uneasy. Fef seems to be a bit jittery too, and before she can get to the bulk of the town she turns off onto some side street near Kingsley Lake. Now, you’re the only car on the street, having left behind your travelling buddies on the main road. You follow it for five or so miles while you play with the GPS. “Pull off here,” you advise once you get within a couple of miles of Lawtey. There’s a side road meant for power line maintenance that runs perpendicular to the road, and you figure that’s a decent spot to pull up in the brush for the night.

When you get far enough from the road, you drive a bit into the brush. You wince when you hear a branch drag along the side of the car, probably scratching your paint job. Fef turns the car off, douses the headlights, and waits.

You listen, too. It seems that cicadas will always buzz, whether there’s an apocalypse or not, but everything else is quiet. As your eyes adjust to the darkness, you think about what to do next. Sleeping in the back would be more comfortable in terms of space, but it’s packed. Since you won’t be leaving the car on, there will be no air conditioning, so it’s going to get fucking _hot_. Thinking of this, you shed your muscle shirt, wary of your bullet graze all the while, but keep your shorts on for now. “You can borrow a muscle top to sleep in, if you want,” you offer.

Fef giggles, responding, “Call it a _tank top_. You need to have actual _muscles_ for ‘muscle shirt’ to work.”

“Hey,” you say, offended, “I work out three times a week! I’ve got plenty of muscle.”

“I’m teasing, I’m teasing,” she says easily. “You’re very manly.”

“Damn right I am.”

“For a hipster, that is.”

Huffing, you lean to the back to start shoving things aside so you can recline your seat. “Do you want some clothes to sleep in or not, seeing as you don’t have any of your stuff?”

“As long as you don’t watch me change.” She smiles and winks at you, and you’re relieved that she turns away to search for something to put on so she doesn’t see you turn red to the tips of your ears. “Can I borrow some boxer briefs, too? They’ll be tight on me, but I really don’t want to wear the same pair of panties forever.”

“Sure,” you say, turning completely away and almost _cowering_ in the corner, thinking that if you think about any of this too hard you’re going to _be_ hard, and that would _not_ end well. It takes her a few minutes to change, and when she gives the all clear, you try not to pay attention to the backflips your heart is doing from seeing her in your clothes. It isn’t like she doesn’t borrow your stuff from time to time, though seeing your boxers on her is certainly new and wonderful.

Gulping, you ask, “Should we sleep in shifts? If so, I’ll take first watch.”

“No, I think we should both get some sleep and get going as soon as the sun comes up,” Fef says, a yawn eating the last few of her words. “I’m a light sleeper, I’ll wake up if something happens.”

You don’t fight her. Both of you recline your seats until they’re as flat as you can get them and grab some blankets you got from the gas station. Tossing one at Fef, you settle in, trying to get comfortable and ignore the throbbing of your shoulder. Once you’re under the scratchy fabric, you know it’s going to be too hot, so you use it as a pillow instead. Fef does the same. She attempts to get comfortable as well, and you end up on your stomach while she curls up on her side. “Glasses,” she says, reaching over and plucking them off your face and setting them in a cup holder.

“Thanks,” you say softly. You consider taking off your rings, but ultimately decide that leaving them on would be best, since they can also serve as knuckledusters if an errant zombie somehow finds its way into the car and you don’t have time to grab your gun.

“Goodnight,” she yawns, turning over to face the door. You mimic her yawn and wiggle a bit to get more comfortable in the seat.

Even though you feel more exhausted than you’ve ever been, you can’t go to sleep. The day’s events keep playing through your head, particularly your kills of the day. You try to tell yourself that it’s just like when you went hunting with your dad, that you’re just killing animals because hell, you’d never had issues with thinking of killing people before. Your dad has killed _countless_ people during his time in the Marines, and you’d grown up in a house where death wasn’t swept under the rug and whispered behind closed doors like it is in a lot of families, so why is this bothering you?

You killed a man today. Not just a zombie, but a healthy guy who probably would have lived if you hadn’t shot him through the throat. You try to think of it like natural selection, killing off the douchebag rednecks before they can kill you, and you’re almost surprised when you can get behind that mentality. Hell, if it’s to protect Fef, you’ll shoot anybody.

You turn your head towards the door and close your eyes again, but there’s still something nagging at the corners of your stomach, and that something is your mother. Yeah, she’d been one of _them_ , sure, she came at you and tried to eat you, but at the end of the day she’s still your _mom_. The only one that was ever home when your dad spent nine months of the year on bases in other countries and kissed your scraped knees and cried when you graduated from high school and—

Swallowing a bunch keeps you from crying. Your hands clench in the blanket under your head, and you make your mind carefully blank as the scratches on your arms become more noticeable than the chunk that got taken out of your shoulder. 

A sleepless hour later, you start to hear rustling. It starts further away, but as it moves closer you start to hear the _moaning_ that every zombie apocalypse movie tells you to fear. You shift a bit and grab your gun, hoping that Fef’s too asleep to hear anything, but then she whispers, “Have you slept at all?” and you respond, “No.”

You turn towards each other, and since your eyes have finally adjusted you can see her pretty well in the dark, getting some of her features instead of just her outline. “I haven’t either,” she confesses. “I feel too vulnerable out here, and now with this shit… hopefully they won’t notice us. It sounds like a group.”

Over the next few minutes, they get even louder. None of them have brushed against the car yet, but it’s only a matter of time before you get detected. Your hand is clenched tightly on the barrel of your rifle, ready to pull it up and grab the stock if necessary, while the other is resting on the center console. When a zombie finally blunders into the mirror on your side, you don’t know who grabs for whom but suddenly you and Fef are grasping each other’s hands for dear life, and don’t let go even when the zombie lumbers away. 

In the distance, someone screams. You don’t know how far away it is, but it’s probably somewhere on the road you and Fef turned off of earlier. She adjusts herself like she’s going to get up, but you snap, “Stay down!” and she complies. There’s another yell, and then the sound of a gunshot rings in the distance, followed shortly by a few more. 

The shuffling of feet outside your car gets faster and louder as they all begin to move at once, away from you and towards the noise. Once they’re far enough away, you and Fef get up to look out the window, seeing nine or ten shambling figures loping off into the distance, more joining them from the woods. With a sigh of relief that they’re not runners like the zombies from _World War Z_ , you collapse back down into the seat. 

Unexpectedly, Fef doesn’t suggest that you go and help the screamers. Instead she burrows down into the leather like she’s trying to bury herself in it and grips your hand harder. You arrange yourself so you’re more comfortable, never letting go of her. Soon, you’ve both fallen into troubled slumber.

* * *

 

When you wake up, something feels strange to the point where you’re instantly awake, jolting upward and clutching your gun. Looking around, you’re surprised to see that 1) it’s daylight, and 2) the scenery out the window is flying past. “Good morning, grumpy gills,” Fef greets, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel. “Wake up and eat some breakfast, and then _you_ can drive. There’s a box of open Poptarts behind your seat.”

Blinking in an attempt to get your bearings, you ask dumbly, “What time is it?”

“It’s just past ten,” Fef tells you, “and I’ve been driving since eight. We’re approaching a town called Perry.”

Instead of voicing your disproval of her driving two hours without you, you reach behind your seat and grab the Poptarts. You squint to try and read the flavor, but this gets you nowhere without your glasses so you pluck them out of the cup holder and settle them on your nose. Hot Fudge Sundae, _yes_.

There’s a half empty bottle of water in the cup holder right next to Fef, and you take it and wait for her to nod her permission before you take a sip. “Take some Tylenol while there’s still some water in that bottle,” she says.

Between your first and second Poptart, you do just that, and then pull on an undershirt, cardigan (the AC is _blasting_ , and you’re not very good with coldness), and some jeans. Soon, Fef’s pulling over and you’re getting out to take a piss, rifle strapped to your back. Fef said that she’s only seen three or four zombies and maybe two other cars, so you don’t think you’ll see anyone when you get out. Your expectations are met.

When you get back to the road, you tense up because there’s someone pulled up next to your Cadillac, and that someone is six and a half feet tall and is made of thick, dark muscle. Without thinking, you have your gun in your hands and are running towards the car. Fef turns around when you’re almost to them, and she sees you and looks annoyed. “Eridan, put that down!” she demands.

You drop it a little bit so its barrel is parallel to your stomach, but don’t switch the safety off. “Excuse him,” Fef is saying to this mountain, “he’s overprotective. Eridan, this is Equius. Equius, Eridan. Now, I have just been told that there’s supposed to be a military safe house being set up in Tallahassee. I think it’d be better to head there instead of just driving west aimlessly.”

“We have a goal,” you bite defensively. “It’s to go west. That is a plan.”

“Yeah, a temporary _shitty_ plan.” Fef makes a face at you before turning back to Equius. “Where’d you get the information?”

“My father is an engineering professor at FSU,” he rumbles, and you’re surprised someone so big has such a soft voice. “I contacted him when I was first alerted to the pandemic, and he advised that we come join him. There is plenty of food and water, as well as protection.”

“‘We’?” you question suspiciously, and he goes a rigid.

“Pardon me,” he says, and you notice a line of sweat appearing on his brow, “I must have misspoken.”

Fef catches the lie too, raising her eyebrows. “Look, if you’re trying to protect someone, I understand that. We’re not a threat to you. But if you’re part of, say, a raider group trying to trap us—"

“No,” Equius snaps quickly, and you almost shoot him then and there, but then he sighs and slumps, losing a lot of his intimidation factor. “We… we’ve run into raiders as well. It didn’t end well for us, and that’s why we’re trying to get to Tallahassee as quickly as possible. The reason I stopped was I…” He trails off, looking ashamed. “I saw the red cross sticker on a first aid kit in your back window. I was wondering: do you have any pain medication?” 

“That depends,” you say slowly, “who’s it for?” 

“My friend,” he breathes. “She—she is in a lot of pain. Please.” It’s a strange thing to see a man of this size beg, but that’s exactly what’s happening. Even though he is humbling himself for you, you know that if you refused he’d be beating the meds out of you in a second. 

Fef sends you back to the car to get some of the extra strength Tylenol, and you comply. You flick the safety on your gun back on even though you still feel that there’s something strange about this man, but you can empathize with a guy who’s just trying to take care of someone important to him.

“Here,” you say when you get back to where Fef and Eq are standing, and when he holds his hand out you put two of the little white caplets into his waiting palm. “These should tide her over until we get to Tallahassee.”

Though you can’t see his eyes through his sunglasses—which are webbed with thin cracks, and your guess is that it happened during the raider attack—you can tell he’s staring straight at you. “Thank you,” he says, and you don’t know if you’ve ever heard anything more sincere. “Wait here for just a moment, please.”

He heads back to his truck—a large, heavy duty Silverado with a blue paint job that looks custom—and opens one of the back doors, leaning in. You see his mouth move as he speaks, but you can’t hear any of his words.

You feel something on your arm, which causes you to jump, but it’s just Fef’s hand. “Eridan,” she says, almost urgently, “when he introduced himself to me, he said his last name was Zahhak. Like _Horuss_ Zahhak, the guy that worked with my mother for years as the head of her engineering department.”

“And this guy _did_ say that his dad was an engineering professor,” you comment. “Didn’t he get fired a few years back?” 

“Well, yeah,” she concedes, “but maybe he knows something about mom.”

There’s something wrong with that sentence, you note. It takes you until Equius comes back over to figure it out: for the first time in years, she’d referred to Cordelia as her mother. Apocalypses can do funny things.

“Are you ready to get going?” Equius asks. “I’d like to make it before noon, and I know a good back way if you could follow me.” 

“Sounds great!” Feferi smiles. “We’ll be right behind you.”

With that, you walk back to your separate cars, and this time you slide into the driver’s side. After some seat adjustments, during which Equius starts his truck and slips smoothly past, you put the car in drive and take off after him, starting the two-hour drive to Tallahassee.

Traffic picks up the closer to the city you get. Unlike Jacksonville, everyone seems to want to get _in_ instead of _out_. You’re stuck in a traffic jam for nearly an hour before you make it up to the blockade, and the amount of cars that you’ve seen turned away is making you nervous. A moment before, you watched Equius get through just fine, so you _should_ be all right.

“Do you have an ID with proof of Florida state residency?” the guy in a bulletproof uniform asks once you’re at the gate, window rolled down.

“Yeah,” you say, reaching into your back pocket for your wallet. You give him your ID and he looks it over before handing it back.

“Pop the hatch so we can take a look and make sure you’re not carrying anything that is a potential transmitter,” he tells you. “Ma’am, if you’ll roll down your window.”

Fef complies, and you press the button to open the hatch reluctantly. Some other guys look through your stuff and deem it safe while people in face masks approach either side of the car and lean over, shining a light into each of your and Fef’s eyes. “Clear,” they both say.

“Good luck, kids,” the officer says before waving his arm. The gate in front of you is raised, and you pull through. Equius was nice enough to wait for you on the other side, and now that you’ve joined him, he starts driving again. Soon, you’re arriving at a large brick building with the word _infirmary_ spray painted on the side. Equius parks around the side, and you pull in next to him.

He gets out of his truck and jogs over, and you roll down your window to receive him. “I talked to my father on the way in, and he told me the hospital was overrun so the military set up a temporary medical treatment facility here. Hopefully, they have a stretcher…” Then the door to the back of his truck opens, and a small girl slides out, her feet landing firmly on the pavement. Equius whips around, saying forcefully, “Nepeta, I told you to wait!”

“It’s okay, Equius, I’m feeling better now,” the girl says, leaning against the side of the truck. She’s got a long, green coat that almost drags on the ground and a hat with cat ears poking out of it. Most remarkably, however, are the bloody strips of cloth tied around her head and a makeshift sling. “Can we just go inside?”

He heads back over to his friend, and you roll up your window as Fef gets out of the car. Hopefully it’s safe enough to leave here, seeing as you’ve already gotten all of your supplies jacked once in the past twenty-four hours, and you follow, locking up and checking the door handle to make sure it’s all secure. Fef is already following Equius and Nepeta inside, and you quicken your pace to catch up.

You come upon what seems to be an auditorium. It isn’t one where the seats are welded to the ground so you’re not tipped off to its non-apocalypse function by that, but there’s a stage, where military doctors are tending to any wounded that shamble in. Otherwise, the room is filled with row upon row of cots, most already taken. Families huddle in clusters and there’s a pretty big poker game going on in one corner that you’re tempted to try and join, but you’re developing a headache so maybe you should wait and take some Tylenol first so your head can clear.

The rest of your group heads up the center aisle straight for the stage, and you follow, lagging a bit behind. They must have the AC cranking in here; it’s _freezing_ , and you can even feel the chill through your cardigan. Crossing your arms and rubbing at your biceps, you walk up the stairs on the side of the stage and join the other three in the short line.

Fef’s already engaged in rapid conversation with Nepeta, and they seem to be getting along really well despite knowing each other for only a minute or two. Since you really can’t find a gap in their dialogue to drop yourself in, you’re left talking to sweaty, meaty Equius. Looking him up and down, you bet Fef would let _him_ call his top a “muscle shirt”.

“So, Eq,” you begin, reaching a hand to awkwardly scratch the back of your neck, “where are you from? Fef and I hail from Jacksonville, and let me tell you, that place is falling apart quicker than a tower in Jenga.”

He makes a small noise in his throat. “Jenga games can last a very long time, if you play with the right people.”

You snort. “Oh, I forgot, I’m talking to a bloody _engineer_. Anyway, my question still stands.”

“Nepeta and I were in Cape Canaveral,” he finally answers. “We were some of the first out of the area, which is good because I’ve heard that it dissolved into utter chaos soon after our departure.”

“Same as a lot of cities, I’d imagine,” you say. “Maybe Tallahassee escaped because of all the military presence. They’ve got quite a few minor bases around; my dad’s had to come here sometimes since the Marines have offices here.”

“What does your father do?” Equius inquires.

You shrug like it’s no big deal (fuck, your shoulder, _ouch_ ), even though you’re bursting with pride when you say, “He’s a Lieutenant General, currently stationed in Afghanistan.”

Equius nods, accepting the information with none of the awe that you sometimes get, and asks, “Have you heard from him since…all of this happened?”

Sighing through your nose, you shake your head. Equius opens his mouth to say something else, but then a doctor calls, “Next!” and Nepeta is up.

You step to follow them over, but Fef doesn’t move, clamping down on your arm so you won’t either. “We’re in line too, silly,” she tells you. “For your shoulder. How are you feeling?”

Honestly, you’ve gotten kind of used to the constant ache. “It’s not too bad.” 

“I figured you’d want to get some stitches, more for vanity than anything,” she says. “Also, they probably have some stuff to prevent infection.” Blinking, she seems to look a bit closer at you, scrutinizing. “Are you feeling okay otherwise? You seem a bit rigid.”

“It’s just kind of cold in here, Fef. They must have their air conditioning on high or something.” You rub your arms for effect.

“Eridan, it really isn’t cold in here, even for someone like you who can’t take any degree of chill,” Fef says, exasperation flickering in her expression. She reaches a hand up, feeling your forehead with the back of it. After a few moments, she pulls back with a sigh. “I think you have a fever. Hopefully it’ll pass.”

“Next!” is called yet again, and you’re up, heading down to the south end of the stage. The doctor who called is old, probably older than your dad, and her smile is strained. “What’s the problem?”

You begin to unbutton your cardigan as Fef reports, “He got a pretty deep bullet graze last night. We fixed it up the best we could, but I thought that stitches or something could help.”

The woman nods, reaching down to look through her supplies as Fef helps you get your undershirt over your head. You sit down on the edge of the cot, and the doctor leans over, gently peeling off the bit of fabric you’d taped over the piles of gauze. Though she’s very careful, removing the gauze tugs at the blood clot, and you start bleeding again. Tutting, the doctor reaches down for more gauze, getting less than you had the other night—she’s probably trying to conserve it—and applying enough pressure to make you wince. “The edges are inflamed and the area is swollen, but there’s barely any pus so it’s not a bad infection. Did you use anything to treat it?”

“Hydrogen peroxide and triple antibiotic,” you answer.

She looks pleasantly surprised. “Very good. If you’ll follow me around back, we’ll head to a sink and rinse it out some before I stitch it up. Miss, if you could wait here.”

You both get up, Fef giving you a reassuring smile as you go. Five minutes later, you’re heading back, sitting back down while the doctor gets out a needle that’s bent in a weird half circle (you recognize it, since you’ve had stitches twice before, when you were much younger) and some surgical thread. Fef had taken a seat on the cot while you were gone, and you take the spot next to her, since your bad side is still closer to the doctor.

“We’re being very sparring with any anesthetic, so I’m afraid you’ll just have to tough it out,” she says without sounding very sympathetic. “It certainly won’t hurt as badly as getting shot did.”

You gulp.

Half an hour later, you’ve claimed four cots off the stage and are swapping stories. You and Fef had already told yours about raiders taking over the house, after which Nepeta got up to use the restroom. She’s looking a lot better, with the bloody bandage replaced with a line of stitches and a splint on her arm, but Equius still insisted that he go with her. To that, she fucking _hissed_ at him, and he sat back down.

“She saved my life,” he tells you in a low tone, as you and Fef lean towards him so you can hear. “I didn’t notice that one of the raiders had swung up his gun to aim at me, and Nepeta tackled him as he pulled the trigger. She’s very good with small blades and was able to… end him, but one of the other ones was on her before I made it over. He had a bat.” Equius wrings his large hands together. “She has always been very brave, holding more courage than anyone else I have ever met. I would do anything for her,” he proclaims, and it sounds like a warning. “Anything.”

When she returns, you find that you look at her a bit differently—she’s more than a little Asian girl that barely hits five feet, since she was able to take on a crazy raider and _win_. Respect is something you don’t give copiously, but hell, this girl certainly deserves it.

Night hits much later, and when you go to bed, you and Fef shove your cots together, linking your hands on the border between you. Though she falls easily into sleep, you’re awake for hours still. You have a feeling that you’re going to be spending a lot of your nights wide-awake.

* * *

 

It takes five days for the barricades to fall.

Sirens sound in the middle of the night and you’re jolted awake, clutching on to Feferi’s hand tighter as you sit up, reaching for the pistol in your pocket. Fef already has her glock in her free hand and is looking around frantically, just like everyone else seems to be doing. There are worried murmurs and a few errant yells, but soon someone comes over the loud speaker and says, “The outer barriers have been breached and mobs of the infected have entered the city, from the eastern side in particular. Please do not panic, everyone stay indoors, and we should have them cleared out soon.”

“Fuck that,” you mutter under your breath, and Fef has similar sentiments. Gathering the backpacks you’d filled with necessities from you car, you slip out of the building through a side door, unnoticed by the masses. It’s a quick sprint to your Escalade, and soon you’re driving down the road towards the university. The campus is south of the community center you’d taken refuge in and in the southwestern corner of the blockade zone, and from the one time you’d driven over there to drop off Equius and Nepeta it’d taken you fifteen minutes. Now, you fly down the empty street, hoping to cut that time in half without hitting anyone.

You’re examining a pillar of smoke you see in your rearview mirror, trying to figure out if it’s an illusion in the night or an indicator of actual fire, when Fef’s phone starts vibrating. She picks it up immediately with a worried, “Hello?” and you think that it has to be Nepeta. “Yeah, we’re on out way down there and then we’re busting out of the city.” There’s a brief pause, where Fef listens and you watch the dawning horror in her eyes.

Just from that, you almost say that you can’t go back for them. You’ll just have to find the highway and try to use it to get out of the city, though it probably filled up with cars by now just like every other highway in the country. They’re not your priority; _Fef_ is, and if you can save your own skin along with hers, then that’s all the better. But when you hear her saying, “No, Nepeta, everything’s going to be fine, we’re coming to get you and then we’ll get out of town, I promise,” so earnestly, you can’t just abandon them.

When Nepeta beings speaking again, Fef screams, “ _Move_!” because like a dumbass, you were watching her instead of the road and suddenly there’s a _person_ right in front of you, and you’re yanking the steering wheel to the side and hitting the person anyway. They get bashed with one of the headlights and go over part of the hood before they hit the ground, eerily still in your side mirror. You’d swerved onto the sidewalk and before you get back on the road you take out a parking meter as Fef rolls down the window and hangs out of it to look back. Surprisingly, she doesn’t tell you to turn around.

Relief fills you, and you ask, “So it was a zombie?”

She brings her head back into the car, rolling up the window. After a moment of silence, she admits, “I don’t know. I couldn’t tell.”

You have a feeling that you’ll never know.

Pushing down on the gas pedal a bit more, you pick up speed, and Fef says one more thing quietly to Nepeta before hanging up and taking out the GPS to get the directions for FSU’s College of Engineering, since you’re a bit mixed up by the darkness. “Turn left,” it says abruptly after only a moment of being calibrated, and you manage to do so, tires screeching.

If you remember correctly, Stadium Drive is the main stretch, and the GPS confirms it by telling you to continue for 1.1 miles in its annoying-as-fuck voice. Within a minute you’re passing the sporting arena that the street is named for. “I’m starting to see more of them,” Fef reports to you, the shotgun from the gas station held firmly in her hands. “I thought the breach was just on the east side of the city, and this certainly isn’t the east." 

You slow down a bit to maneuver safely around a group that lunges of your car, looking in the rearview mirror to see if you managed to bump one, but your heart lurches into your throat when you see that you’ve got quite a group starting to follow you. Swallowing and looking back to the road in front of you, you watch the side of the stadium until the slight curvature of the road allows you to see around it.

When you do, you wish you hadn’t.

“Oh, _god_ ,” you choke out, hands clenching the wheel. There’s a mob—an honest to god _horde_ —near one of the stadium entrances, and they’ve already heard the engine and are starting to lope towards you. You look into the crowd harder than you’ve ever stared at anything, trying to see an end to the ocean of people, but it’s like looking out over the Atlantic and trying to see the shores of Africa. They’re all in the road, spread out, and there’s no escape, you’re going to have to try and go through them but you’re not going to make it, there’s _no way_ you’ll make it—

“Side road!” Fef screeches, pointing, and you slam on your breaks and look to the right; sure enough, there’s a rapidly approaching street, blocked by just two zombies and then you’re skidding, jolting the wheel to the side, your speed cut by more than half and praying, _Please don’t roll, please don’t roll,_ please _don’t roll_ …

The car doesn’t roll. One of the zombies knocks off your left side mirror with its shoulder, but otherwise you’ve escaped unscathed. Though some of them are still following you, they’re falling behind quickly. You stay at the reduced speed, breathing heavily and stunned. Fef is in the same sort of state, collapsed back against the seat with her eyes closed, hands relaxed on the barrel and stock. “ _Oh my god_ ,” she breathes.

“Recalculating,” the GPS responds calmly. 

You watch Fef’s eyes open and dart over to yours, and suddenly you’re both doubling over, laughing so hard you can barely hear the GPS tell you to turn left onto Jackson Bluff Road. Relaxing so you can focus on driving and _not_ giggling until you’re crying, you make a few turns until you’re back en route. There are more zombies around than you’ve seen before the horde, but it’s still nothing compared to that. Soon, you’re back up to 80 mph.

Five minutes later, you’re idling behind a brick wall, with Fef dialing Nepeta to tell her we’re here. You can’t get any closer to the building; there’s a mob surrounding it, pawing at the windows and banging at the doors. Nepeta picks up almost immediately, and you start shoving supplies and clothes further into the back so Equius, Nepeta, and Professor Zahhak with have room to jump in (and if the father is as big as the son, you’re going to need it). There isn’t a lot of space, since the car’s packed with so much stuff, but it’ll have to do. If anything, Nepeta can hop up front with Fef.

Then Fef is talking in a low voice, saying things you can’t hear, though you know she’s telling her friend where you are. As you watch the building, you see the small girl appear at one of the windows, and she looks even tinier without her long green coat around her shoulders. The zombies notice the movement and bang even harder against the glass, and your stomach drops when a small fissure appears. 

Once she locates you, half hidden behind the wall, she drops, and Fef hangs up. “They’re going to try and exit through the side,” she tells you. “Unlock the doors, and I’ll climb into the back and throw one of them open when they’re near enough. You just be ready to step on the gas.”

You nod sharply, hands kneading the steering wheel as you watch for movement. Fef climbs between the seats and settles by the back door on your side, since it’s the one closest to the building. Within thirty seconds, you see a change in the horde as they’re drawn towards the left side of the engineering center, where the three people you drove here to pick up are rounding the corner, sprinting at full speed. Nepeta is way out in front, being the fastest despite a concussion and cracked ribs, slicing at anything that lurches into her path. Equius and his father are slightly behind, as the latter is having some trouble running, probably because of arthritis or some other old person ailment. 

More zombies come around from the back, and they’ve still got a good hundred feet to cross before they reach the car. You’re tempted to blare the horn as a signal to hurry the fuck up, but that would just attract zombies and _not_ help whatsoever. As Nepeta gets within twenty feet, you step on the brake and prepare to shift, mapping out your escape route in your head. Hopefully Professor Zahhak and his knowledge of the city will fill in the gaps.

Just as you think that last sentence, the man goes down, spilling a boxful of papers out onto the pavement. Equius stops in his tracks, raising a baseball bat and swinging at the zombies closing in on his father and knocking them back. Nepeta is _so close_ to the car, but she turns back around, running to help. She slashes her knife at a small child that slipped under Equius’s arcing bat, slitting her throat. Blood squirts from her severed jugular, coating Nepeta’s hands and Professor Zahhak as she pulls him up easily for someone with a broken arm and Equius covers their backs as they start towards your SUV again. The horde is right on their tails, Equius barely managing to keep them at bay, and then Fef’s throwing open the door and jumping back into the front seat as Nepeta dives in, with Professor Zahhak blundering in after her. Equius throws himself in backwards, hitting his father and reaching to slam the door shut as you put it into drive and floor the gas pedal. 

The car takes off, and you have to swerve around some groups of zombies that are very adamant about getting to your SUV. Some get knocked down and are crushed under the tires while others lunge too late, and you follow the road until the older Zahhak says, “Turn left, then stay on the street for a mile.” 

You follow his instructions, and as you turn the wheel you notice how badly your hands are shaking. You’re wheezing even though you didn’t have to exert yourself, and when you try to control your breaths, the tightness in your chest gets worse. A lump appears in you throat as you realize what’s happening, and a wave of nausea hits you. “Fef,” you hiss, just loud enough for her to hear. “Get me an Ativan. Please.”

She looks at you anxiously, hands already reaching for the glove compartment. “Eridan, if you’re having a panic attack it’s too late—”

“No, Fef, you don’t understand, I’ll feel better just get me one, _please_!” you stress, still trying to keep your voice down. It’s taken on a strangled quality.

“Is everything all right up there?” Equius asks. Your eyes flit to the rearview mirror, and you see that he’s using one of your shirts to clear his father’s arms of infected blood. Your eye twitches.

“ _Fine_ ,” you say, much too cheerily. “Everything’s fine.”

Fef is looking through the first aid kit now, trying to find the ziplock bag with your pills. “As soon as you can, pull over and let me drive,” she commands in a low voice before handing you a tablet.

You accept it greedily, popping it into your mouth and maneuvering it under your tongue so it dissolves faster. Ativan is supposed to be fast acting, so hopefully it’ll hold off the attack, even though “fast acting” still means fifteen or so minutes. Though you feel the tiniest bit relieved after the last of the drug dissolves, you know it’s just because you know it’s in your system now.

A hand covers yours on the steering wheel, and you almost jerk the car. Fef’s thumb runs over your knuckles as she says, “I want you to breathe with me. Now in…” 

Taking a deep breath is hard. It hurts your ribs and goes against your reflexes, but you know she’s right to try and do this so you make an effort to breathe in rhythm with her. As long as your hands are shaking, Fef keeps hers on top, and while you try to tell yourself that her presence is calming and you’re overreacting, you still feel like you’re about to die. 

When you go a minute without seeing a zombie, Fef makes you pull over, and you get out of the car and walk around the front as she jumps over the center console and into the driver’s seat. Within seconds you’re taking off again, and soon Professor Zahhak instructs you to take a right.

“We follow this road until there’s a turn, and we go right, past Cascade Lake. It’ll take us to State Road 20,” he says, his breathing a bit labored. “It will take us out of the city. The road goes past a lot of state parks and we can easily avoid the main highway. The next patch of civilization is about thirty miles away, but the next big settlement is Blountstown, about an hour down the road.”

As you listen, you place your forehead on the cool glass of the window, for once not caring if you make a smudge. Closing your eyes helps your headache, and you hope that you avoided the crisis. 

Once you’re settled on the main road, you feel Fef’s hand on your knee. “Feeling better?” she asks, voice kind. 

“Yeah,” you say, not caring about how thick your voice sounds. “I’m sorry.”

She squeezes. “Don’t be, it’s not your fault.” 

Taking a deep breath, you lift your head from the window and turn around to the back. Professor Zahhak doesn’t look very good, skin pale and sweaty (though if he’s anything like his son, sweating buckets is completely normal). A cold lump of dread forms in your stomach, and your hand finds your pistol as you ask, “Were you bitten?" 

“No,” he says measuredly, looking at you from beneath thick-lensed glasses. “I have checked, and I have had Equius check. If I were, I would not hide here in an attempt to save my own skin and risk the life of my son. I’m clean, I’ve just got some blood on me.” 

For some strange reason, you believe him. Giving him a terse nod, you settle back into your seat.

The clock on the dashboard says it’s 4:13am. Night is a bad time to be driving, but you don’t really have another choice. Leaning forward, you turn on the radio and try to find some stations from Tallahassee, to see what’s going on. You know that you listened to quite a few that gave regular reports back when you were at the shelter, but as you flick through the stations, all you can find is static.

You go through the FM station by station, and then do the same for AM. On the latter, you find two where you can hear a voice, but can’t make out words over the static. Pushing down your feelings of dread, you find a CD in the center console and slide it in. _Moonlight Serenade_ plays as you exit the city limits.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Will Professor Zahhak know anything about Feferi's mother? Will they ever arrive somewhere without it being overrun by raiders or zombies? Why were Equius and Nepeta listed _after_ Karkat and Kanaya, even though they show up first in the story? (I'll answer this right now: it's because I've lost control of my life.) Will they ever find a working radio station, and figure out the fate of Tallahassee? Maybe, if you're lucky, you'll find you next chapter!
> 
> And yes, there is a Cascade Lake in Tallahassee, and the route that they took made them go right past it, so I _had_ to include it. This chapter is dedicated to Google Maps, because I have been using the site to construct routes and it's very helpful. You can follow their path exactly, if you want to, but I really doubt you do because it's tedious. Just know that it's all accurate.
> 
> I was hoping to finish this up next chapter, but the more I write the longer it gets. I'm guessing that it'll take two more parts to finish up, maybe three. Thanks for reading!
> 
> (Wow why are there two end notes that's annoying sorry.)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was a really hard chapter for me to write and I really don't know why. It took _way_ longer than I thought it would, there are quite a few parts that I rewrote multiple times because I thought they were awkward (and they probably still are), and there are some parts that I just didn't know _how_ to write. So hopefully this isn't too painful to read.

When the sun decides to make an appearance, the population density begins to rise with it. After passing the town of Freeport—which is unsettling because of its lack of anything living, truly alive or undead—you have a choice to make: drive north and try to take I-10 or stay on the road you’re on now. With the former, the interstate is larger and would probably have other motorists to worry about, but State Road 20 goes through a lot of beach towns, and there’d be no avoiding people there. Fef voices that she thinks they should go north, to the interstate and to Alabama; you can’t help but agree, but when you turn around to see if the Zahhaks and Nepeta have anything to say on the matter, they’re all asleep, with the Professor looking more haggard by the minute. You guess an apocalypse really ages a person.

You tell Fef to pull over once you’re out of town, and you switch spots, her taking the passenger seat and you settling yourself behind the wheel. As you pull off the median, Fef starts messing with the radio, trying to pick up a signal. Despite her best efforts, it’s all just static.

“The world is falling apart so fast,” she murmurs, leaning her head on the window. “Will there even be anyone left to rebuild when this is all over? Hell, will this ever _be_ over?”

“I think one day it will be,” a deep, grumbling voice says from the back, and when your eyes flick into the rearview mirror to look, Professor Zahhak is propped up against the window, eyes closed but awake. “Humanity has had to suffer through many toils before, and we have always come out of our struggles better than we were at first. The will to live isn’t something that can be stamped out so easily.” 

“The zombies,” you start, but that doesn’t feel quite right so you revise, “those _people_ have a will, too. They want to survive, and they have a drive to carry on their disease. I feel that the only way to overcome this would be with a cure, and if the day comes where such a thing exists, whoever is left fully lucid will have to face what humanity has done to itself by killing such a large majority of the population in order to survive. And I’m not sure if we’ll be able to recover from that.”

Professor Zahhak rasps a laugh, face twisting in anything but humor. “I wish I didn’t know that there’s more truth to that than you think.”

There’s a tense silence while everyone contemplates what has been said, and it takes half a minute for Feferi to break it. She turns around, looking the older Zahhak even though he’s turned away. “Sir, I couldn’t help but notice you have a certain resemblance to a man who worked for my mother’s company, in both name and deed,” she says. “Did you ever work for Crocker Corp?”

His eyes fly open and he leans towards her, drinking in her features until his mouth is a hard line. “My God, you look just like her,” he breathes, chin falling to his chest. “I don’t know how I didn’t see it before.” 

A chill goes through you as he raises his hand and makes the sign of the cross on his body.

Fef seems alarmed as well, and she looks at you, _what the fuck?_ clearly written in her gaze. You shake your head slightly, weirded out, as Horuss Zahhak looks back up. “I think that if God has mercy left in Him after this, he will not waste it on me, because working for that woman should have me damned.”

You see Fef’s mouth go dry, and even though you know she hates Cordelia, you snap, “That’s her _mother,_ for god’s sake, don’t be so fucking disrespectful.” _And creepy_.

He swallows, lips trembling. “Forgive me,” he says, “but you have to understand that she… she may have had a hand in this.”

Slamming on the breaks seems to be a good option, but the zombies lingering just beyond the tree line beg to differ, so you resist the impulse, instead yelling, “ _What_?”

This wakes up Equius and Nepeta, who spring into fight mode. The calm down once they see the car hasn’t been breached by the undead or something similar, but the atmosphere is still sizzling. “My mother owns a _baking_ corporation,” Fef says firmly, staring him down. “Yes, she has branched out into a lot of other areas—one of which I am aware _you_ were in charge of, Professor Zahhak—but honestly, you must be _senile_ to think that she would have her hand in something like this." 

“A few years ago, she was approached by a powerful man, who used the alias Lord English,” Horuss says, placing his elbows on his knees and dropping his head onto his folded hands. “He said he’d ruin her company if she didn’t go along with him, and to prove it he said he’d make her stock drop ten points in one night. When the reports came in the next day that this had indeed occurred, they struck a deal. I do not know what sort of deal it was, but I do know that what resulted was very, _very_ illegal. I was in engineering so I only heard whispers, but people were tossing around words behind closed doors like mind eating parasites and genocide, and I was driven to contact the police. They found nothing, and I was fired as soon as the investigation was over. But they…” He swallows heavily and dabs his sweaty brow with his sleeve. “I do not wish to talk of the things I was commissioned to make. I’m going to go back to sleep, and if I feel like it later I’ll answer more of your questions.”

He turns to the window and falls against it, as if he went immediately to sleep. Your eyes dart back to the road and then to Fef, where she’s turning back to sit in her seat correctly. She folds her hands in her lap, staring at them meekly as if she’d been scolded, and you reach over, placing one of yours on top of them.

“Is everything alright?” Nepeta asks quietly, poking her head up between your seats.

“Try to get some more sleep,” Fef says, giving the girl a tired smile. 

Nep slides back in between Equius and the window, curling up against his side as he turns his head towards the two of you, though you can’t tell who he’s looking at because of his sunglasses. “Please excuse him,” he mutters. “He isn’t as put together as he usually is, since he is no longer able to take his blood pressure medication. His worry of his condition may be causing him to say things he would not otherwise.”

“You don’t need to apologize, Equius,” Fef laughs lightly, smiling bitterly. “I already knew my mother was horrible.”

From there, the drive goes back to being quiet. It seems that Nepeta and Equius fall back asleep within the hour, and in that time between you make it to the highway.

When I-10 comes into view, you’re expecting a lot of things: a sparse sprinkling of drivers like you’d experienced further east, cars stacked bumper to bumper in gridlocked traffic, or even a bunch of zombies overrunning it, making the road impassable. But when you approach and merge onto the highway, it’s completely, entirely empty. 

In front of you and behind you is a vast stretch of tar that goes on to either end of the horizon, and despite this there is not a single car in sight. As you drive a few miles, you pass your first one, an Oldsmobile with a flaming hood that crashed into one of the signs announcing exits. The stench of burning flesh creeps into your car even with the windows shut, and you wonder how long ago they’d perished.

You know you’re halfway there when you skirt Pensacola, where graffitists have turned billboards into canvases for gang signs or written Bible verses across them, from Isaiah ( _“Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise. You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a dew of light, and the earth will give birth to the dead.”_ ) to Revelations (“ _The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended. This is the first resurrection_.”) to Zechariah (“ _And this shall be the plague with which the LORD will strike all the people that have fought against Jerusalem; Their flesh shall rot away while they stand upon their feet, and their eyes shall rot away in their sockets, and their tongue shall rot away in their mouths_.”) and you’re relieved when you finally leave the city behind. The shambling masses of undead and gunshots from below that you could see and hear from the overpass weren’t soothing in the least.

Fef watches the city disappear in the mirror, breathing a sigh of relief when it’s finally gone. Professor Zahhak stirs in the back, making grumbling noises that hint of the disturbed dreams that you’ve all been having lately. At least the three of them back there are able to get some shuteye; you and Fef have been running on three or less hours of sleep every night since this pandemic began. You’re not necessarily at peak performance.

Just when you think Fef might be drifting off and you cross the state line into Alabama, you hear something strange from the backseat. In the rearview mirror, you watch as Horuss’s eyes fly open and lets out a throat tearing growl, and when you meet his eyes you get choked up, barely able to release a horrified “ _Oh god_ ,” before he’s reaching over to his son and tearing his ear off with his mouth. 

Equius wakes with a yell, shoving the zombie off of him and yelling, “Father _, father_!” He pins his dad to the door with his feet, hands groping at the place on his head where his ear is hanging down, still attached by a thread of skin, and you jerk the car to the side of the road, pulling over and slamming on the breaks. Fef is fumbling in her pocket for her glock when the thing that’s Horuss Zahhak lunges forward, trying to get to her around the seat. With a terrified yell, you shove him off, almost getting your fingers bitten in the process as Nepeta enters the fray, slashing with her knife.

Somehow, the back door on the passenger side opens, and all three of them crash out onto the pavement in a huge brawling heap, blades slashing and blood spraying. You stare in horror as Zahhak Senior takes a chunk out of his son’s leg and then Nepeta’s tackling him as Feferi throws her door open and moves to get out and help before you throw your arms around her shoulders, begging, “No no Fef _please_ , stay in here _stay in here_ ,” as she squirms.

“Just let me shoot him!” she shouts at you, glock finally in her hand and you let her go. She barely takes a step out of the car before there’s a loud shot and the professor who swore he wasn’t bitten slumps to the ground, bullet in his head. Fef shoots him twice more for good measure. She’ll have to reload soon, since now there should only be two bullets left in the magazine; it holds fifteen, and you’ve been counting every shot religiously since the day you gave it to her. Dazed and horrified, you open your door and walk around the car to stand behind Fef.

You wonder morbidly how the package deal of Nepeta Leijon and Equius Zahhak is going to work, now that half of the team that had been joined at the hip for so long was going to be zombified. Nepeta lets out a keening sound and throws herself at her friend as you get out of the car and walk around to stand next to Fef. She’s clutching onto him for dear life, rambling incoherently in sadness and then in rage, cursing God and the disease and life itself. You have to turn your head away. 

“We need to get moving, anything could’ve heard the gunshots,” you mutter to Fef, making a jerky gesture with your head towards the SUV.

Her eyes dart to you, and her voice is as venomous as she can make it around the lump in her throat when she speaks. “God _dammit_ , Eridan, give her a fucking minute. Think if it were you and me over there; they’ve known each other just as long.”

After that little declaration, you start to choke up too, and you make yourself watch as they say goodbye.

“You have to go, Nepeta,” Equius is saying, voice huskier than you’ve ever heard it. “I’m sorry, I can’t protect you anymore. I’ve failed.”

Choking on a sob, she hisses out, “The protection was _mutual_ , and we failed each other.” With a bitter smile, she holds out her functional arm, teeth marks clearly visible just above her elbow. A little, tinkling laugh falls from her mouth as she says, “It seems that AC and her best friend will be going on this next hunt together.”

Fef sees the bite too, and she reaches for your hand, clasping it for dear life. You squeeze, trying to reassure her that you’re here with her as the two doomed souls embrace on the pavement in front of you.

It seems that Fef only grabbed you to get a bit of extra strength. It’s not long before she lets go and steps forward, gun dangling limply from her other hand. Nepeta looks up to watch her approach, and when Fef stops, Nep says, “Thank you so much, Feferi. For everything.”

Your girl falls to her knees and captures the other in a hug, and you can tell Fef’s being careful because of Nepeta’s cracked ribs that will never have to opportunity to heal. Equius looks over at you, misery plain on his face as he says, “Leave us.”

Letting go of Nepeta, Feferi tries to hand her the glock, holding the barrel loosely with the stock pointed towards her friend. “I want you to have this.”

“No,” the other girl says, shaking her head. “We’ll use it once and then it’ll go to waste. We won’t need it after…” She gulps. “You need it more than we do.”

“That wasn’t a request,” Fef says, voice going firm. She always tries to make sure that she’s nothing like her mother, but in moments like these you see a lot of Cordelia in her. Honestly, that sort of resolve and determination is going to save her life one day. “You’re not going to suffer. I won’t allow it.”

Nepeta seems set against taking it, but Equius reaches over and grabs the grip. It’s nearly swallowed in his large hand. “Thank you,” he sighs. “I appreciate it.”

You can tell Fef wants to stay with them, but hell she’s only known them for a few days. They should spend their last moments alone, and that’s why you walk forward, crouching down to put your hand on her shoulder. “Come on, Fef,” you murmur in her ear.

“No.” Her voice cracks. 

There’s no real way to say goodbye to friends you know will be dead within the hour. It feels _dreadful_ to leave them alone on the side of the road with a gun and nothing but each other. You can’t help but wonder if they’re going to kill themselves or if one of them is going to shoot the other and then turn the gun around, or what.

“Turn around,” Equius says, and when you look you see a couple of zombies beginning to make their way out of the sparse line of trees behind you, and where there’s two there’s bound to be more. They’d probably been drawn in by the gunshots. It seems that Nep and Eq aren’t going to have much time together, after all. “Go, and take care.” 

Nepeta reaches out with her broken arm, grabbing Feferi’s hand. With a squeeze, she grins and says, “It’s up to you now, so be careful!”

“I will,” Fef promises, voice thick and tears that she’d managed to hold back spilling over. With a quick look back at you, she corrects herself, “ _We_ will.”

Fef gets up, walking quickly back towards the car. You’ve always been shit when it comes to goodbyes, and this sort of departure is something you never thought you’d have to face. Giving them a little nod, you say, “I’ll kill a whole bunch of ‘em in your names.” It didn’t come out the way you thought it would, since comfort through bloodlust might be applicable to you alone, so you add, “Good luck, yeah?”

You’re horrible and awkward, but there’s really nothing else you can think of to say. Turning, you jog back to the car, immediately pulling away from the scene. One of the zombies hits one of your taillights as you slam on the gas, and you wait for the gunshots.

You don’t hear them until Equius and Nepeta are just tiny dots in the distance. They’d probably done that purposely, you realize, so you and Fef wouldn’t have to see. Fef curls up in her seat, wrapping her arms around her knees as her shoulders shake with suppressed sobs, and you want so badly to pull over and _hug_ her, but the best thing to do for now is drive.

 

* * *

 

Ten miles later, you decide to check the radio again. Surprisingly, you find a working station almost immediately, and he tells you to avoid Mobile, as the city’s been overrun by hordes. People further west had been trying to get there, apparently, and that caused all sorts of chaos and then bam, the city was lost, just like that. You take the next exit you can and head north.

Driving through the small town of Bay Minette is a new experience. You can see people staring at you from boarded up homes and pointing guns at you from atop roofs, and even though no one shoots at you, you’re tense the entire way through. Your gas gage is looking low for your tastes, and you look around for a station, but every single one you pass has large OUT OF FUEL signs out front, so you give up hopes of finding a place. Your stash in the back will just have to do. It’s just as you see a sign that a highway (I-65, to be specific) is five miles ahead that your low fuel light turns on.

It’d probably be best to refill while you’re off the interstate, but the threat of the people in the town makes you hesitate. They shouldn’t be aggressive towards you— hell, you’re only filling up your car with gas—but then you think of the generators they might need fuel for or people desperate to get out of town but don’t have gas, and you decide to get further away from town before you refill. You check with Feferi to see if you’re making a stupid decision, and she just gives a little nod when you’re done explaining what you think should be done. It makes your stomach hurt, seeing her so sad. 

Reaching over, you squeeze her knee, and she turns her head to look at you. Words fail you, and you just stare back, mouth set in a grim line. Saying something like _“it’ll get better”_ is daft, and “ _I’m sorry_ ” would probably set her off. At a complete loss, you swallow and lean over the center console awkwardly to place a kiss on her temple. Settling back in your seat, you look at the road and avoid her gaze as you try not to blush. God, you’re so _stupid_ sometimes. 

A few minutes later, you’re reaching the merger and pulling off to the side. Everything seems calm, and you pop the hatch and walk around to the back while Fef rolls down her window and grabs the shotgun. As you unload the gas containers, she shimmies out of the window and pulls herself onto the roof of the car, ending up sitting crisscross applesauce with the gun in her hands. Her face is shadowed, but it’s not the lighting that’s causing it. 

Unscrewing your fuel cap, you dump the five-gallon in first, following quickly with the second one. You’re in the middle of pouring the first two and a half gallon tanks when Fef gives a little whistle and raises the gun. 

Lumbering over is a pack, a group of zombies five strong. They’re coming from the highway and you don’t want to think about the implication that creates as Fef takes her first shot and you finish off the tank. Pumping to release the shell, she fires again, but this one isn’t as lucky as the last and she just blows off one of their arms. You quickly put all of the containers, empty and full, back into the SUV and by the time that’s done she’s taken out another one the remaining three are _right there_ and you pull out your pistol, giving a headshot to the one in your way before you dash past them and into the car. As Fef slides back in through the window, the zombie with its arm blown of walks repeatedly into your hood and tries to climb, but all it accomplishes is bleeding all over it. 

You throw your car into reverse and nail the gas pedal. The two behind you go flying and when you hear a shattering sound your heart lurches because _that was not a zombie_.

A “stay off the shoulder” sign has gone through your back window, and you just want to let your head drop onto the steering wheel because _wow_ you are an idiot.

“Just go,” Fef sighs. “I’ll fix it while we’re driving.”

“With what?” you question as you shift into drive.

She thinks a moment. “Duct tape.”

Groaning, you pull back onto the road, avoiding the things twitching on the ground as well as the one that’s still running at you with blood spraying from its stump of an arm. More have started coming towards you, drawn by the gunshots, and you dodge them as you pull onto the highway.

When you see the pavement stretched out before you, you gulp and nail it. There are more cars than you’ve seen but none of them have people in them; they’re just empty shells, crashed on the side of the road or parked in the middle of it. A mosh pit of zombies are letting loose strained screams as they tear into what’s left of someone who you think was very large, his form splayed out on the pavement thirty feet in front of a car with a broken windshield that had crashed into a streetlight.

Tearing your gaze away, you focus on what’s in front of you. The stretch of road in front of you is debris filled, and you’ll have to pay attention if you don’t want to crash and end up like the dude that’s currently having his intestines ripped out. For the first time since entering the car back at Peixes Manor, you put on your seatbelt. 

Feferi makes a little amused noise in her throat, and when your eyes flit to her she’s still looking properly sad, but there’s a bit of a smile at the corners of her lips. Her fingers run over the strip of nylon crossing her chest. “You didn’t learn anything from _Zombieland_ , did you?” 

 _Rule #4: Seatbelts_ pops into your head, and you snort. “Yeah, yeah,” you sigh, smirking. “I know I’m an idiot.”

“Hopefully it isn’t terminal,” Fef remarks as she undoes her own seatbelt and climbs into the back. 

Soon, your window is “repaired”, and you’re listening to Marie Booth give out information from Mobile, Alabama. The city was lost, according to another station, but you figure that a few people must be barricaded in that recording studio. You wonder how long they’ll last.

The highway is taking you towards Booth and her apocalypse buddies, but Fef looks through maps on the GPS and selects a route that’ll take you northwest instead of southwest, and you’ll only need to spend twenty more miles on the highway before turning off onto a smaller state road, with the next city being over a hundred miles away. 

“At this point, we’re assuming that countries that _haven’t_ declared a national state of emergency and aren’t talking are lost,” Booth is telling you in a crackly voice. “Apparently we’ve been lucky so far, since we’ve getting reports from places like India and China that say they’ve lost 95% of their populations in just a week to death and infection. At our last check in with the FBI, they were reporting that we’re suffering a 75% population loss, though we’re not quite sure how accurate that is because we’ve lost contact with outposts in New England, southern Florida, and the California coast.”

Your mouth goes dry, and you want to look at Fef even though you have to focus on the road. _75%_ of the country, gone in one week. You think there were about 315 million before, so what does that put you at now, around 80 million people? That’s…

“Insane,” Fef murmurs under her breath, finishing your sentence for you. “The whole world has gone mad.” The little laugh she gives is almost crazed. “Maybe we should follow suit.”

“I know you don’t mean that,” you say, because if anything, _you’d_ be the first to give up.

She makes a soft noise in her throat and goes back to leaning her head on the window, still grieving. It’s been a long day, even though it’s barely even ten o’clock. There are still _hours_ left for even more shit to go wrong.

You end up doing a tricky maneuver that’s almost a U-turn to get off the highway and onto SR 43, which you’re only on for about a mile before turning onto a different road. Within the half hour you’re passing into Mississippi, and when you see the sign for it you and Fef sing the “MIS, SIS, SIPPI” spelling song until you’re both nearing hysterics.

Hattiesburg comes up in about an hour, and you skirt the town, the road clear of people even though State Road 98 merges with an interstate, which you stay on until you’re north of the town and onto SR 49.  Apparently, you’ll be staying on this road until you hit Jackson in about an hour and forty-five minutes. To your relief, this road is just as barren as some of the stretches back in Florida, and the trip becomes even less worrisome. After the clusterfuck that was this past stretch of road, the empty road is no longer disturbing. 

About halfway there, you pull into a rest stop for lunch. After scoping the place out, bathrooms and all, you find only one or two zombies that you take care of with pitchforks. You both clean up in the women’s room, washing traces of dirt and blood off your skin and rinsing your hair our awkwardly under the sink so it doesn’t get greasy. Fef sighs when you leave for a moment and come back with a bottle of hair gel from the glove compartment and style your hair into its normal wave, combing it through after. She looks at you with a strange expression on her face, shaking her head with a slight laugh when you send her a devilish smirk. You can tell she thinks you’re an idiot, but the way she’s looking at you makes you feel warm. As you’re tucking your comb into your pocket, you get attacked as she throws her arms around you, almost smothering you in her embrace. You wiggle around a bit, getting your arms unlocked from your sides so you can hug her back. “Never change,” she breathes into your neck. 

It’s weird, because she spent the majority of high school trying to get you to change. You guess that in a horrible situation like this, seeing regular, routine things is a sense of comfort. Resting your cheek on her hair, you hold each other until your stomach grumbles.

You almost expected the car to be gone when you come out of the bathroom, but it’s still there in its scratched up, duct taped glory. In your head, you have a brief moment of silence for the car that used to be spotless before opening one of the back doors to look for—

Oh. You forgot about all the blood.

It’s all human, though some of it is certainly tainted with disease. Most of it is on your clothes, which is what the Zahhaks and Nepeta had to sit on, and with a heavy sigh you start chucking your wardrobe out onto the pavement. Fef comes along to help, and you almost tell her to go until you see the resolve on her face. Convincing her to go do something else wouldn’t be easy, so you refrain.

Once three quarters of your clothing is out of the car, you fold the rest neatly on top of a tarp that you laid over the folded up seats to cover the bloodstains. With that job over with, you open the hatchback to find something to eat. 

Fef comes across an electric hot plate that you’d taken from the gas station, and instructs you to find some Velveeta; she knows she threw some in there. “We’re going to have mac and cheese.”

“Great, it’s going to be like we’re back in college,” you deadpan, and she nudges you with her shoulder before going to find a power outlet. There’s one sticking out of the ground with a waterproof casing over it by the picnic tables, and that’s pretty perfect. You pull the car around so it’s closer to the area as Fef finds a pan in all the clutter and goes into the backroom to fill it up with water. While she does that, you dig in your car for your standard charger; since your Escalade is a hybrid, you’ll be able to have a small store of electricity ready for emergencies, though all of it has been used up to increase efficiency. Though a standard plug isn’t the best way to charge your SUV, it’ll have to do.

Once that’s settled, you sit down at the picnic table. Left alone, you can’t stop thinking about all of the blood in the back of your car, and the people that provided it. Professor Zahhak _swore_ that he wasn’t bitten, and somehow you still believe him even though he’d turned and killed his son. You remember the cuts on his arms, where he’d rubbed all the skin off from falling on the pavement on the way to your car, and the zombie blood that had gotten on the scrapes when Nepeta knifed one. Maybe it wasn’t necessarily the bite that got you, but any sort of fluid that entered your body. Some zombie movies had experimented with that kind of thing, but you can’t remember if they’d been flops or not. Either way, you’d keep your shoulder wound well covered, even though it’s healing well with the stitches.

You plug in and turn on the hot plate, and Fef comes back with the water. It’ll take a while to boil and longer still to cook, but you think you and Fef will be fine as long as you stay alert and keep your rifles nearby. Laying her gun on the table next to yours, she slips in next to you, snuggling up to your side and sliding her arm around your waist. Seeing as you’re the one that usually has to cuddle up next to her, you’re a bit surprised but curl yourself towards her, putting your arm around her shoulder and letting your cheek fall onto the top of her head.

“Do you think we’re going to be okay?” you can’t help but ask, and it’s embarrassing how small your voice sounds. Being booted out of the one place you felt secure in and watching new friends be mauled and bitten can really shake one’s hope.

You feel her finger start to draw patterns on your hip; she always traces or doodles on things absentmindedly, even when you’re her canvas. It’s become a comforting gesture. “I _think_ so,” she says with only a small trace of her usual optimism. “As long as we’re _really_ careful and…” She sighs. “I think it might be safer for it to be just us from now on. I mean, if we see someone that needs help of course we should aid them, but,” she swallows, “attachment hurts. We have to stick with what we have.”

As usual, she’s right. Turning your head, you kiss her hair, thinking that there’s so much you want to say to her that you’re either too afraid to voice or your pride won’t let you admit. “Here’s what we’ll do,” you say. “We’ll find a place to hole up in—a place that still has electricity and good cell service in case someone tries to call us—and wait all this out. Maybe it’ll take months, or years, or maybe it’ll never stop, but in the end it’ll still just be you and me. And…” You tear at your lip with your teeth before venturing, “I think that’s all I’ll ever need.”

She lets loose a little laugh, taking the free hand that was on her lap and interlacing her fingers with yours. “Ever think we’ll get sick of each other?”

Honestly? You _know_ she’s gotten sick of you before, but you hope that you’ve toned yourself down enough that she can handle you for extended periods of time. The best year you’ve ever had with her was this last one, since she and Sollux Captor had a mutual breakup when it turned out that an old friend of his went to his university, and Vriska Serket ended your weird thing where you both would get out of your mind drunk and sometimes fuck. No relationships (however loose the term was in your situation) in either of your lives had affected you for the better, and when both of you are single it’s a lot easier to be in love with her. 

“I could never get sick of you,” you answer truthfully, and that’s the closest you’ll ever get to ‘I love you’. You kiss the tip of her freckled nose. 

She pulls back from you a bit, and your stomach lurches into your throat. You open your mouth to ask what you did wrong but get caught in her gaze, as benevolent and blue as it’s always been. There’s something else there, though, nothing that you’ve ever seen directed at you but you recognize it as a hint of something you always noticed when she looked at Captor. You’d always been so jealous that he’d been able to get that kind of adoration from her, and now that you’ve got even a hint of it, the feeling of pure _hope_ that almost overtakes you is better than you’ve ever thought it could be. Just when you think all of the staring is turning awkward, she reaches up, cupping your neck in the back of her hand as she surges up and kisses you.

You’ve imagined this scene over and over again in your head, though none of your horny imaginings ever took place at a picnic table in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. Romantic scenes like this have been in your head since before you hit puberty, and the emotions were always the same: passion, ecstasy, lust, _love_. 

But this isn’t your imagination. At first, your teeth clack together uncomfortably, but then you both adjust, you moving to straddle the bench and wrapping one arm around her waist while the other cups her cheek. What hits you after a few seconds is that this feels _normal_ ; there’s no blinding white light or a chorus of angels to celebrate that you’re finally kissing a girl that you’ve wanted to marry since you were six and everything was so innocent, and Fef doesn’t glow like a goddess or entice you like a siren. She’s just _Fef_.

She’s just Fef and soon she’s running her tongue over your lower lip, and for once in your life you’re a little bit grateful that Vriska practically trained you for two years. You open your mouth to let her in, and the next few minutes dissolve into snogging.

Too soon, you’re both out of breath and you stop. You end up lying down on the bench with Fef resting on top of you, her head on your good shoulder. Even though you know she has better stamina, you’re ready again before she is, and you start by leaving a trail of slow kisses across her jaw and down her neck. Sliding your hands under her shirt, you start to tug upward, but she moves her hand down to grab one of your wrists, stopping you.

That snaps you out of your starry-eyed daze. You blink, removing your hands with your face heating up to the tips of your ears, suddenly painfully aware that she can probably feel the press of your boner against her hip. “I’m sorry,” you murmur.

“I just didn’t want to do that in public,” she says, squirming a bit. “Anyone could see.”

“Who’s gonna watch, the zombies?” you question playfully, quirking an eyebrow. “Come on, Fef, nobody is going to see us." 

She giggles, taking one of your hands and letting them dangle off the side of the bench so they scrape the grass. “Tone down on the testosterone.”

With a squeeze, you respond, “Well, you started it,” and she makes a little hum in her throat. Closing her eyes, she tries one more time to get comfortable before taking an impromptu nap.

…Are you _that_ boring?

In a few minutes you hear the water start to boil, and you wiggle your way out from under her. You’re not sure if she managed to fall asleep and you woke her up or if she was just dozing the whole time, but she gets up slowly, grabbing her gun and going to another picnic table a few feet away. After dusting the dirt and leaves off the top, she climbs up and lays down, her shotgun pointed away but within arm’s reach. Exhaustion must be hitting her hard.

You pour in the noodles and stir with a plastic fork, putting it next to the hotplate and setting your phone timer for seven minutes. Slipping it back into your pocket, you head into the bathroom and take care of yourself before going over to Fef, sitting down on a bench and putting your head down on the table near her chest. Her hand finds its way into your hair and even though it’s still damp from the bathroom and has a coating of gel on top, she runs her fingers through it. It feels wonderfully comforting, and if you were a cat, you’d be purring like mad.

When the timer goes off, you groan and try to fold into yourself. Fef stops combing through your hair and pokes your cheek, saying, “Go, overcooked noodles are gross.”

Reluctantly, you get up and walk over to the hotplate, turning it off and taking the pot. You’re about to start pouring when you realize something. “Fef?”

“What?”

“I don’t think we have a strainer.”

Grumbling, she slides off the table and walks to the back of your car as you get some of the water out by tipping the pot and being _very careful_. Fef can’t find a substitute so you can’t get all of the water out before opening the silver processed cheese packet. The end product is a bit soggy, but it actually tastes pretty good.

Soon you’re on the road again. It’s been decided that you’ll drive until four or five while Fef sleeps, and then you’ll switch off and she’ll drive until it’s night. You pass some weird towns like Magee and Mendenhall before turning off onto a smaller road in order to give Jackson a wide berth. In about forty minutes, you’re coming up on Crystal Springs when something big appears in the distance. 

Ice shoots down your spine and you reach over to Fef and give her shoulder a shake. She wakes just enough to shove your hand off, curling away from you and muttering something that sounds suspiciously like _fuck off_. “There’s something in the road,” you say, and she sighs, forcing herself awake and stretching. 

As you get closer, you’re tempted to start humming something from _Les Mis_ because there’s a fucking _barricade_ blocking the road. It isn’t like one of the military ones back in Tallahassee, where there were metal fences and army Jeeps with soldiers but an honest-to-god _mountain_ of tables, chairs, appliances, dressers, and even a few broken pianos. You’ll never understand how they managed to fit it all together and stack it this high, and maybe you’d even admire their work if the damn thing wasn’t blocking your path. 

The street you’re on isn’t exactly in the best of shape and it’s skinny enough that it’ll be awkward for you to do a three-point turn, and slowing down in the middle of Hicksville, Mississippi wasn’t included in your original plan. You don’t see anyone or anything mucking about, so you should be safe from idiots and zombies, but there are homes and farms a few hundred feet back from the road that probably contain survivors.

…Or not, seeing as the roadblock is rather impractical for keeping zombies away, since it only covers the road and not the grassy ditches to the sides of it.

“Should we try to go around?” Fef asks, leaning forward in her seat as if that’ll help her get a better look. You start slowing _way_ down, since that’ll give you more time to think and lessen your chances of crashing into the damn thing, and are within about a hundred feet of the barrier when a shot goes off.

One of the windows in the back shatters, and the bullet slices into a bag of flour. Cursing, you break and jerk the wheel, beginning to turn around. Fef grabs her gun and looks outside, trying to find the shooter but seeing no one. As you throw the car into reverse, another shot rings out and your window shatters. You feel the bullet penetrate your headrest and you shriek, accidentally slamming the gas pedal and backing the car up into a mailbox. Just before you move the gearshift back into drive, a movement catches your eye and you scream, “Get down!” as Fef’s window explodes in a spray of glass.

You both managed to duck in time, and the bullet whizzes over both your heads and out of the car through your broken window panel. Since the shot came from Fef’s side this time and all of the previous came from yours, there has to be two of them. The one you’d seen is no longer in sight but you know they still have to be there, and as you get back in drive and nail the gas, the guy on your side shoots again and the car jerks a bit.

 _We are going to die_ , you think, and you wonder if you should reach for your last Ativan. _We are going to die just when I finally managed to make out with Fef._ Great.

“He hit a tire,” Fef reports, pressing herself against the seat and gaze darting from mirror to mirror to try and get a good look at them. They come into the road when you’re a good football field away, shooting and managing to knock a few holes into the rear panel but not nailing any more windows or tires, which is wonderful because you only have one spare.  The one they hit is the back right, and it feels like the car is dipping more with every rotation. “We need to get out of here before we can risk pulling over. You _do_ have a spare, right?”

“Yeah,” you respond, gulping. “Do you think the car is going to catch on fire?”

“Eridan, this isn’t _Grand Theft Auto_ ,” she says, before revising. “At least, I _hope_ it isn’t. It’s not like I’ve ever had my car shot at before.”

“That's lovely,” you sigh, pushing down on the gas a little bit more. “With any luck, it’ll hold out for a while.”

You go back about three miles and when the smell of burnt rubber starts to get too strong, you pull off into a church parking lot with the idea that religious or not, no one would _dare_ bother you right next to one. Before getting out of the car, you pull the parking brake for the first time ever and grab your rifle. Sweeping the area uncovers a couple of zombies, which Fef gleefully take out with her pitchforks, and it turns out that you have to unload a lot of your stuff to get to the chamber that holds the spare tire and the tools you’d put in when you first got the car. While you get everything out, Fef loads the rest of the gas into the tank and is done by the time you find the little notch in the metal and slide the jack under the car.

Fef’s shadow falls over you as you reach for a wrench. “Do you even know _how_ to change a tire?” 

“Of course,” you say as you start undoing the bolt of the hubcap. “My dad taught me car stuff, and I wasn’t allowed to get my license before I could prove that I knew how to change a tire or oil or whatever. Now, watch the master work.”

Fef has to help you with some of the trickier bolts, but soon you’re replacing the tire and attaching it while Fef rolls the old one into a ditch. Thirty minutes later, you’re heading back out. Fef insists on driving because she won’t be able to go to sleep after this mess anyway, so you spend some time with the GPS working out a route that’ll take you well around Crystal Springs. It turns out that if you follow the road behind the church, it’ll take you well around the town, and eventually, you’ll get to Vicksburg.

About an hour later, you’re merging onto an interstate. Relief fills you when you see other travellers like you, cars packed with supplies and people; it’s proof that you’re not alone in your sanity. The flow of traffic is smooth, with about fifteen cars you can see and more past each horizon. Since no one is heading in the opposite direction, it seems that everyone has the same “head west” idea that you and Fef came up with. 

After a few miles on the highway, a truss bridge appears in the distance and you see a sign that almost makes you smile. “Hey, Fef,” you say, “guess what we’re about to cross.” 

She looks at you bemusedly before focusing on the road again. As you cross onto the bridge, there’s another sign and this time she sees it. “Neat,” she says, bouncing in her seat.

The Mississippi River is something you’d been learning about since elementary school, and neither of you have ever seen it in person. Despite knowing that it’s pretty polluted, as the sun sets it glimmers exquisitely, with boats darting back and forth across its surface. What surprises you most is the bank of the river on the Louisiana side: there are people camped out in tents, cooking and reading and cleaning weapons. Even though there’s a town right across the river and according to the GPS, Tallulah lies about twenty miles down the road, people have made their own makeshift city that stretches in either direction as far as you can see.

At times like this, it’s hard to believe that it’s only been a week since the world tried to destroy itself. Despite all of this bloodshed and Professor Zahhak’s proclamation that Fef’s mother started this, an emotion swells in your chest and it takes a moment to realize that it’s pride. 

…Honestly, you should be pretty used to that feeling by now, but for once you’re not proud of yourself, but of the human race, for its adamancy to cling to life. 

Settling back down into your seat, you look at Fef. She notices your gaze and turns to smile at you. “Onwards?” 

The word makes want to turn on the _Doctor Who_ soundtrack that she’d gotten you for your fourteenth birthday (it’s in the center console, just waiting for you) but you resist the urge. Instead, you just grin back. “Onwards.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Will Eridan and Feferi ever figure out where to go? Will the characters in the (revised) tags make appearances? Will Eridan get to second base and beyond? Will Feferi get better at dual-wielding pitchforks? These questions may be answered in the next chapter!
> 
> Whelp I've never written a make out scene before and I don't really have experience to draw from, so hopefully that wasn't too awful. The next installment should be the last, though saying that now will probably jinx it. I hope you enjoyed the chapter (because wow this was hard to write, and if it showed I'm really sorry), and since I have the events of the final chapter planned out, it shouldn't take long to write. Thanks for reading!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well here it is, the final chapter. It was postponed because band camp started and I lost control of my life, but I forced myself to type all of it today so the fic would finally be complete. Take note that the warnings in the tags are mostly for this chapter, so if need be, tread carefully. I hope it lives up to your expectations.

_“Reports from Washington say that California has officially been marked as a dead zone. If this is correct, the Golden State will be the second of the western territories to be declared as such, after Nevada’s loss this past Tuesday. This means that the list of dead states has gained its fifteenth member. A caller yesterday inquired about the term “dead state” yesterday, so a definition has been provided: a state qualifies if it is estimated to have lost more than 99.999% of it’s population. For California, this means that around 380 people remain in a state that had more than 38,000,000 people. That’s a neat statistic, since all the number did was drop five zeros. I didn’t think anything in California could deteriorate faster than its economy.”_

“Did he seriously just make a joke about millions of people’s deaths?” Fef questions incredulously.

A corner of your mouth quirks up. “It seems so.” 

She makes a disgusted scoff and turns off the radio. “I miss the regular evening news.”

“I just want a bloody traffic report,” you say, scanning the road in front of you. Fef and you had switched seats again a couple of miles back, leaving you with a whole new set of travellers to share the road with. The further you progress on the interstate, the more cars appear, and though they’d been a comforting sight at the beginning, now they’re just making you uneasy. If you’re lucky, you’ll reach Shreveport at around 5:30pm and if you push, you’ll be in Dallas by sundown. But there’s one issue.

You’re almost out of fuel.

Every gas station in every town you’ve passed through had large _Out of Gas_ signs in front of them. In Shreveport, you imagine that you’ll find the same thing, but you don’t want to abandon this car; it’s been good for you, through being abused and shot at. Plus, you’ll be hard pressed to find a truck big enough to hold all of your shit, since those were probably taken near the beginning of the pandemic. As of this moment, you’ve got maybe an eighth of a tank left, and the second your low fuel light turns on you’re almost sure that you’re going to shit your pants.

You’re jolted out of your moody worrying by Fef’s tinkling laugh. Questioningly, you turn to look at her, but she’s not focused on you. She’s staring out of her smashed window at a car that’s keeping pace with you, where two little kids that can’t be more than seven or eight have their faces pressed up to the glass and are making faces at her. If there was a window for her to smoosh her face against, you’re sure she’d be returning the gesture, but instead she just watches and giggles and waves.

“Eridan, do you have some paper and a pencil somewhere?” she asks after a minute.

“There should be a pen in the center console, and my sketchbook is in the glove compartment,” you say. “Please don’t flip through it.”

Rolling her eyes, she gathers the materials. “I won’t invade your privacy,” she responds, flipping to the back. “Anyway, it’s probably all porn and coffee cups.” 

“It is _not_ ,” you defend adamantly. There are maybe _two_ coffee cup sketches and no smut to speak of. When doodling you stick to the things you’re comfortable with: landscapes, nautical themes, and Fef. 

“Whatever,” she sings, already starting to write something out in big letters. Clamping down on the sides of the page so it doesn’t flap in the wind, she holds it up for the kids to read.

“What did you say?” you question.

You observe her as she watches them scramble for paper and writing utensils. They come up with a notebook and some crayons, and the girl starts writing. “I asked them where they were going.” 

As you wait for the response, you see a large piece of spray painted plywood propped up on the side of the road, reading _Temporary Safe Zone, 5 miles_. Maybe you’ll pull off there, but it could just be a trick played by raiders or something. During your pondering, the little girl has finished her message. She holds the notepad against the window, the shaky green text reading, “Texas. You?”

Feferi responds, “Shreveport,” because you don’t have plans past trying to get gas. Under that, she adds, “Where did you guys come from?” 

There seems to be a bit of a squabble over the notebook, and then the driver turns around to yell something at them. The guy at the wheel seems to be a bit younger than you, maybe still in high school, and he’s definitely not related to them; though the kids are moderately tan from what you suspect is playing outside, the driver is obviously Latino. Anyway, he seems to lack the buckteeth and glasses that are characteristic of the younger ones.

“Atlanta,” the boy scribbles in blue. “It’s gone now.”

With a bittersweet smile, Fef writes, “We’re from Jacksonville, and that’s gone too. I’m glad you got out okay!”

The girl snatches the pad back and draws a weird looking smiley face. You see the driver mutter something under his breath and the boy perks up just before Fef berates you for not looking at the road.

A few seconds later, you assume the boy has written something else because Fef makes a small distressed noise in her throat. “They’re hungry, and they don’t have any food.”

You sigh loudly. “Fef, didn’t you just say a couple of hours ago that we should stay away from other people?”

“Unless they need our help!” she exclaims, turning to look at you. “We have plenty of food, and they’re just little _kids_ , Eridan. I _know_ you saw that safe zone sign.” Her tone has turned accusing. “We could pull off there, share some food, and part on good terms. Maybe they even have extra gas!”

The word “gas” almost makes you pop a boner. If they _did_ have extra, you’d do anything to get it, from sharing food to doing minor sexual favors. “Fine, tell them to pull off there.”

She writes fast, relaying her plan to them (though you’re 99% sure that the good Samaritan in her keeps her from asking for gas just yet) and they seem ready to jump out of their car in excitement, and the girl leans forward, popping her head to the front of the car to tell the driver. You see his expression go slack, and then the workings of guilt start to show on his features, and now you’re almost certain that he told them to ask for food earlier when he was muttering. It seems that he wasn’t expecting them to ask, or that you would give them any. He looks away from the road for the first time and makes eye contact with both you and Fef, looking lost and a little bit hopeless before he snaps irritation back on and turns to the road again, switching lanes to get further to the right. You speed up a bit and pass him easily, and then move in front of him.

Soon you’re pulling off at an exit where another plywood sign is directing you, and more arrows spray-painted onto the road lead you a few miles away to a state park. The woman at the gate checks both of your cars thoroughly and gives you passes. “Be out by the same time tomorrow. The camping area is down this road and to the left. The bathhouses don’t have hot water, but the plumbing still works fine. There’s a trading post set up in the old nature museum, you’ll find it on the map.”

You lead the other car to the campsites to find that it’s packed with travellers of all kinds, and it’s hard to find a semi-secluded spot. The kids in the shitty Toyota come bursting out the second it stops, and Feferi rushes to meet them once you put the SUV in park. Before you join them, however, you grab your rifle. You’re not going to be hostile, but it’s a good thing to have, even if you’ll just be holding it casually.

The second Fef sees you with it, she gives you a look that makes you want to curl up in a ball. “Put that back in the car _right now_ ,” she snaps. 

“We have to be careful,” you say. “Just because this is called a ‘safe zone,’ it isn’t automatically _safe_.”

“If you have to have it, lean it against the car.”

“Someone might steal it!”

“That’s _your_ problem.”

Huffing, you rip open the passenger door, toss the gun inside, and slam the door so hard the remaining windows rattle. You don’t bother locking it because someone could just lean in and take things because of the broken windows, though if they hit the unlock button from the outside, the car alarm would go off.

When you approach the group, Fef is crouched down to be at eyelevel with the kids, and their driver is standing a bit off to the side, watching with a slight scowl. You decide to approach him instead of the group. “So what’re you doing with kids?” 

The guy snaps his gaze away from his little terrors to glare at you. “Wow, personal questions already. You could at least buy me a drink first.” 

His voice is raspy like a smoker’s and his tone is irritated, but you don’t let that faze you. Crossing your arms over your chest, you retort, “Well seeing as we’re about to just _give_ you food, I think I’m entitled to some questions.” 

He mirrors your arm movement and sighs like you’re the most difficult person in the universe. “Fine, I was _babysitting_ them. I’m not the new star of the now cancelled reality TV show _Teen Dad_. Hell, I would’ve had them when I was like, ten. That’s fucking gross. Anyway, the apocalypse happened, their dad never came home, and Atlanta was obviously going to ruins fast so we left.” 

You make a noise of acknowledgement in your throat before sticking out your hand. “Eridan Ampora, by the way.” 

After a moment of bemusement on his part, he gives your hand a firm shake before dropping it quickly. “Karkat Vantas. So where’s the fucking food?”

 

* * *

 

For all that Kar is crass and uncomfortable, you can tell that he’s incredibly grateful for the Chef Boyardee. You think it’s fucking disgusting because you hate eating things from cans, and you know it’s not Fef’s cup of tea either, but she let the kids pick from your makeshift pantry and that’s what they wanted. John and Jade, you come to find they are named, eat ravenously, and Karkat murmurs to you that they haven’t eaten since lunch two days ago.

“We should get out of here soon,” you say after sitting at a picnic table for an hour. “Places like this aren’t as safe as they seem.”

“It looks like they keep it pretty well patrolled,” Karkat argues, sipping on a bit of water. You make a note to fill up your empty jugs by the bathhouse before you leave. “I think we can kill a bit more time. Anyway, the cell service here is better than it was on the highway, which is weird.”

You don’t comment on that, because you hadn’t noticed. No one calls you, and you don’t call anyone, so you don’t really need to be aware of where your phone has a strong signal. 

The showers in the bathhouse call to you. You’d love to take one, cold or not, but you don’t want to leave Fef alone with these strangers, and the alternative to that would be leaving them alone with your car full of supplies, which is something you’re not quite prepared to do. Though Kar seems like a genuinely nice guy under the rough exterior, you won’t get anywhere by trusting them. 

…Well, you’d stop smelling like a sweaty sock.

“Anyone else want to take a shower?” you ask before you can change your mind. “Kar, we’ll watch your stuff while you guys head to the bathhouse if you watch ours when you’re done.”

There, you went and offered the only thing you’d accept. If _he_ trusts you with _his_ stuff first, then it’s less likely that he’ll come back and take yours. He looks up from the ground, meeting your eyes with an expression like he knows exactly what you’re doing. It’s almost unnerving.

Then he stands, brushing dirt off his pants and looking at the kids. “Come on you little shits, it’s time to get clean.”

Despite how snappish Kar is with them, John and Jade seem to _adore_ him. They come up on either side of him and take his hands before pulling him towards the brick building in the distance. He mutters the entire way, his expletives only broken by shouts where you can’t quite make out the words.

“We should give them the rest of the ravioli,” Fef proposes, reaching over to grab your hand as if that’ll sweeten the deal. “Neither of us like it very much, anyway.” 

“Fine,” you say, letting your fingers curl around hers. Both of your palms are sweaty from the heat and humidity, but you can’t bring yourself to care. With a sigh and a squeeze, you let go of her hand too soon. “I’m going to check their car for gas.”

“Eridan, _no_ ,” Fef objects, turning to follow you as you get up. Karkat left his keys at the end of the table, so you scoop those up and hit the unlock button on the remote. “That’s incredibly rude!”

“I’m not going to steal any if they have it,” you say. “I’m just going to see if it’s there. If it is, then we know to ask for some, and if it’s not, then we don’t have to say something about needing gas and we seem like selfless people who didn’t expect anything in return for the food that we’re so graciously giving them. It’s a win-win situation.” 

Sighing in defeat, she helps you look around in the car. You don’t rifle around at all because you have to leave it untouched, but you’re sure there’s no gasoline in the main part of the car. Turning the engine on reveals that they have almost a full tank, so they must’ve found gas _somewhere_. You pop the trunk and this time you _do_ move stuff around, but there are just some blankets, batteries, spare clothes, and a football.

You slump back to the picnic table, sure to cover your tracks by locking the doors and leaving the keys exactly how they were before you took them. “See?” Fef says, poking your bicep. “We just wasted our time just to be assholes.” When you don’t make any noise, she changes the topic. “I think we should stay here tonight.”

“Doing that would just push back the inevitable,” you debate, though there’s no fire in it. “We’re _going_ to run out of gas, we’re _going_ to have to hunt down a new car, and we’re _going_ to keep heading west.”

“I’m getting really sick of this ‘go west and everything will be okay’ mentality you seem to have,” Fef says, sliding closer to you and putting her head on your shoulder to show she’s not angry. “I mean, I was all for it at first, but we’d have to be retarded to think we could just keep going and end up doing the right thing. We need to admit that we don’t have anywhere to go or any goals other than _live_ , and that we need…”

“We need _what_ , Fef?” you question, letting your head fall on top of hers. “A destination? An explanation? A _purpose_? Shreveport’s our best bet, and from there—”

“Shreveport’s closed,” Kar deadpans, plopping down on the other side of the table. His hair and clothes are damp and his sharp edges seem eroded (perhaps from standing under the shower spray), and his little charges aren’t in sight. “No way in, no way out.”

“How do you know that?” you question as you lift your head up, you words coming out a bit harsher than you meant to.

Rolling his eyes, Kar props his head up in his hand and snaps, “It was on the radio, fuckwad.”

Fef looks around before turning back to Karkat. “Where are John and Jade?”

“They wanted to take longer showers,” he answers. “They’ll be fine, Jade bites like a piranha and John can fucking _scream_ ; plus, the place is zombie free.”

“We were thinking about staying for the night,” Fef says, and you know _exactly_ what she’s trying to do. You hate it when she gets other people to gang up on you. “Would you like to stay here?” 

To your relief, Kar shakes his head. “Can’t. We’re trying to make it to Corsicana by tonight. My stepsister is there with a group that’s trying to preserve the place. It’s by a huge reservoir and lots of forest, and it’s a good fifty miles from Dallas, so it’s as good of a place as any. Since Shreveport isn’t an option, where are you guys headed?” 

While you’re silent, Fef admits, “We don’t know. There isn’t a plan in place.”

“Come down to Corsicana with us, then,” Karkat proposes. “I’m sure they can take two more people. Eridan, are you any good with that rifle or is it just for show?”

Squaring your shoulders, you say with pride, “I’m a trained sharpshooter.” Your father let you be no less.

Nodding, Karkat says, “Good, they’ll be able to use you. Feferi?”

“I’m a decent shot,” she says. 

“She’s an _awesome_ shot,” you correct, letting you pride in her replace your haughtiness, and she smiles at you. You started teaching her to shoot right after your father started teaching you. Albeit it was with pellet guns and not the real thing, but she’s still good, as proven by some of her headshots. “And she’s good with pitchforks for melee combat.” 

Karkat gives you a weird look. “What do you think this is, _Left 4 Dead_?”

All you do is shrug while she perks up. “I actually prefer the pitchforks! They’re fun to wield and you don’t have to reload them.” You also need a lot of strength to be able to pull them out of bodies, and Fef certainly has that. 

Nodding pensively, Kar says, “Ahh, I understand. You both are fucking _crazy_.” You and Fef laugh a bit at that, but as soon as his expression goes somber, you’re ready for a topic change. “Do you guys have any idea how… y’know, all of this happened? Because I’m completely in the dark over here.” 

You and Fef exchange a glance. All you know is the nonsense that came out of Professor Zahhak’s mouth, and you can’t confirm a word of it, so it would be best not to mention that it might be genetically engineered (or worse, _purposeful_ ). “No,” Fef says. “We don’t know anymore than you do.” With a tired smile at you, she gets up. “I’m going to go take a shower and make sure that the kids are alright.”

“Fine, but beware; the water’s fucking _freezing_.”

With a grin that makes Kar look unsettled, she says, “Well, I like cold showers!” and flounces off. 

Sighing, Kar braces his palms on the bench and leans back, looking up at the sky. “So, did you and her know each other before this mess, or did you just pick each other up along the way?”

The smile on your face is bittersweet, and you droop forward, resting your chin on your folded hands. “I’ve known her since we were four. Her mother was having an important business party that my family had to attend, and Fef shoved me into the pool, suit and all. I was mad for a while, but she was just so _enchanting_ that I haven’t been able to leave her alone since.”

Kar’s mouth twists into something that might’ve been a smile, but even though the corners of his lips are upturned, his expression is still dour. “I had a friend like that. We met at daycare a long time ago. She was the craziest person I’ve ever known and she licked fucking _everything_ , and I latched on and didn’t let go until I was forced to.” 

You figure that last part was a way of telling you that she’s dead. Your stomach twists painfully at the thought of losing Fef that soon pops into your head. “There… there could still be a cure,” you say quietly. “I know that there’s something left of the person after they turn—I have _proof_ —so maybe all of these people can still be saved, as long as they weren’t torn apart.”

Well, that last thing could’ve been said with a bit more tact. A+ on that one, Ampora. 

He stops looking at the sky in order to level his glare on you. “Okay, shitdick,” he says, “I want to know _exactly_ why you think that there’s some part of legitimate sentience left in beings that can do nothing but shamble around and lope ravenously after prey in some kind of fucked up hive mind.”

Despite knowing that this question was coming, the inquiry isn’t something you feel completely comfortable answering. Hell, you’ve just met this kid, and though you’ve clicked pretty well with him through his abrasive attitude, your reasoning is pretty damn personal. 

…But if Fef had turned and someone was withholding hopeful information, you would want to hear it.

“I was alerted that this apocalypse was occurring when my mother tried to eat me,” you say, and it’s very hard to hold back a (slightly hysterical) laugh because of how _ridiculous_ it sounds. It’s the first time you’ve actually said it out loud since you told Fef what happened on the day of, and it feels weird coming out of your throat. “She caught me completely off guard, and I was in bed so I didn’t have any kind of weapons right by me, and she had just been infected so she was still fast and strong. She just sort of… _leapt_ onto me and I didn’t know what the fuck was going on, and I barely managed to kick her off.” You stop yourself because you realize that you don’t need to give Karkat the play-by-play, and the memory is making you twitchier than usual. “Anyway, after some grappling I had to bash her head in with a lamp. Got a bloody mess all over my sheets,” you remark like you’re making an inane comment on the weather. 

“Dude,” Kar’s demeanor exudes illegal amounts of pity, “Eridan, I’m so sorry. Well, fuck, I’m not _sorry_ , I wasn’t involved, but… no one should ever have to do that.”

Shrugging, you say, “I’m over it.” He gives you a look that has equal amounts of _you’re crazy_ and _I don’t believe you_ , so you get to the point. “The thing is, my mother wasn’t home when she was turned. Her car was gone, and judging by the time of day, she should’ve been almost to work by then. So that means…” you trail off, something stuck in your throat that you have to swallow a few times to get past, “That means she had to come all the way home from wherever she was. She had to remember where ‘home’ was even if it was just a little bit of instinct. Kar…” You take a deep breath. “She came home to kill me. And that’s why I think there’s still something left of the people who get infected,” you state decisively. “If my mom could remember where she lived, how much of these _things_ are the person they were before? That’s why I never let myself forget what we’re actually shooting at: _people_. Sure I call them zombies because that’s what they are more than anything else, but with the possibility of a cure and the fact that memories can be accessed in some form, we are killing people.”

This makes him angry. “What does that make us, then?” he bites. “I don’t know one person who hasn’t bashed some heads to keep themselves and the people in their care safe.”

You look him straight in the eye, your gaze unwavering. “Murderers,” you say. “We had to kill them, of course, because we need to keep people safe like you said, but that doesn’t excuse us in the long run.”

“Look, I don’t know about you,” Kar barks, “but I don’t care if there’s a chance for a cure or salvation or what. I’m never going to become one of them just because you think they’re people. _Never_.”

Holding your hands up in surrender, you emphasize, “I never said that I wanted to become one. I’d _never_ want that for myself, and I wouldn’t want that for Fef. But keep my situation in mind the next time you think you’re going to get off 100% scot-free for all the killing you do.”

Grunting, he lets his head fall onto the table. “Just go take a fucking shower, Ampora.”

After gathering some clean clothes and a blanket to use as a towel from your car, you do. John and Jade pass you on your way over, babbling and clean, and Jade waves at you. You’ve always been horrible with kids, so you just give her a little wave back and wonder if you’re going to end up stuck in a car with them. 

And that’s exactly what happens. Half an hour later, you’re reorganizing Karkat’s car, folding blankets into small squares and shoving them to the sides of the trunk so you can fit in food, water, first aid supplies (complete with tampons and condoms), pitchforks, and ammunition. The guns themselves ride next to you. Any spare clothes that you want (you have to leave most of your dwindling collection behind, which breaks your heart) get shoved at your feet in the passengers seat, while two backpacks full of miscellaneous tools are shoved in the back with Fef and the kids.

Though Kar’s Toyota is in better shape than your Cadillac, the latter would still be much better to have. However, you don’t have any of the correct tools to siphon gasoline and God knows if you’ll ever run into another gas station, so it has to stay here, where someone will be able to use it for camping instead of you having to abandon it twenty or thirty miles down the road. As Kar pulls away, you almost start crying; you _love_ that car. You got it for your sixteenth birthday and it’s been your faithful companion ever since, even following you up to the northeast for college and while you’ve always salivated over your dad’s Corvettes, the Escalade was _yours_. Fef hugs your shoulders from around the seat. 

The trip—comprised of off-key singing, Karkat losing his temper eight times, and conversations about things from video games to aliens—tires you out. When you make it to Corsicana after three hours, you’ve had to jolt yourself awake quite a few times and John and Jade are asleep with their heads on Feferi’s lap. The town is bigger than expected, with a population of just over 20,000 people that hasn’t dropped at all since the pandemic started, and through the work of everyone able, a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire surrounds the town. It’s good enough for now, but they’re going to have to upgrade. 

“You have to have family in here to enter,” the guard at the gates tells you, and you think that they’re going to tell you and turn around to leave until Karkat says, “My stepfamily is here. Look up Maryam, and if they don’t show up, Strider.”

The man does just that. He has to call the family and get their confirmation that he’s one of them, and you’re only able to breathe regularly after the gates close behind you. Karkat doesn’t seem to know his way around, so he calls his stepsister— Kanaya, he calls her—and gets directions to her house. Apparently, she was doing a summer study program in Houston when the apocalypse started, and one of her professors knew she lived far away and took her to Corsicana along with her daughter, where Professor Lalonde’s brother lived. 

 _Great_ , you think when Kar pulls into the driveway and a little blonde girl and boy peek out from underneath the blinds. _More fucking kids._

The door of the house flies open before Karkat can even get out of the car, and a willowy Indian girl is barreling straight towards him, worry and relief plain on her angular face. As you get out of the car, they embrace, and you’re almost startled by how short Kar looks next to her. Kanaya is only a couple of inches shorter than you, which is strange, since the only people you’ve come into contact with lately (save for the Zahhaks) have been around a head shorter. Maybe you won’t be hanging around with dwarfs anymore.

 

* * *

 

You get a wonderful night of rest curled up with Fef on the floor of the living room. Since there isn’t a center console between you or you’re not on two separate cots, you can spoon like you’ve always wanted to, your arms around her stomach and face against her neck. She keeps one hand on yours at all times and your legs are tangled together under the blanket and even though the floor is hard and uncomfortable, you think it’s one of the best nights of sleep you’ve ever had.

Smiling sleepily, you kiss the back of her neck and nuzzle into her shoulder. “Good morning,” you murmur warmly. “It’s time to wake up.”

“I’ve been awake,” Fef whispers, sounding uneasy and entirely lucid as she runs a thumb over your knuckles. “There was news.”

This turns your blood cold. You can’t even have a five-minute break without something bad happening, can you? Holding her closer, you ask, “What happened?”

She exhales through her nose. “Dallas fell. It was doing so well, and now it’s burning and the dead are dispersing. You can see the smoke from here. The fences should keep any strays out, and the population is more dense to the north and west of the city so we should be safe down here, but there are 6.5 million potential zombies and that doesn’t bode well.” 

You let go of her, rolling over to flop onto your back, limbs splayed out. “We never get a break, do we?”

Fef doesn’t answer. You just lie there together for a few minutes as you let the veil of sleep fall away, and soon you’re getting clothes out of the car to change into. Maybe Fef can finally get some underwear of her own and stop using your boxer briefs, since they’re probably uncomfortably tight on her hips. Sometimes it sucks to have a really thin waist.

After a really awkward breakfast with everyone (there are ten people in the modest house) you, Fef, Karkat, and Kanaya go out to go shopping. Surprisingly, the grocery store hasn’t been ransacked, and people are even _working_ , as if the world hasn’t fallen apart. It’s like this Texas town wasn’t even touched by the pandemic.

Everyone else does most of the shopping, but you’re elected to push the cart. It quickly fills up with items from Poptarts to dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets to oatmeal. You can only get a limited number of items because there’s a rations system in place, but the town is in the process of making deals with farmers in the area to start trading goods.

As Feferi and Karkat squabble jestingly over little details, Kanaya hangs back to converse with you. She’s elegant in every aspect: in the way she walks, talks, and even swings a chainsaw (though this is only a rumor, as you haven’t seen it for yourself). You discuss the futures you would’ve had—she was in premed in the same year as you at Rice, while you studied mechanical engineering at Cornell. It turns out that she’s very interested in fashion and you have to admit that you’re pretty chic for a guy, so you’re able to keep up with her jargon and even offer to help on designs if she ever needs it.

When you return to the house, you help put away groceries until Fef drags you into the bathroom for a shoulder check. The stitches look almost ready to come out, but you decide to give it one more day, and Fef tapes more bandaging over it. For a moment after she gives it a final pat, she looks like she’s going to kiss you, but as you start to lean in she turns away, grabbing your hand and leading you into the living room, where the kids are watching _Squiddles_.

The kids are later sent to Dave’s room and Karkat digs around in the movie cabinet to find the shittiest romcoms they have to offer. You and Fef watch them curled up in an armchair off to the side, and she falls asleep on you during _Fifty First Dates_ while you’re lost on _27 Dresses_. You wake to the entire living room singing “Benny and the Jets” as if they’re drunk themselves.

As everyone files off to their respective areas of sleeping hours later, you’re told that tomorrow is going to be a workday. There will be construction, repairs, and sweat.

That turns out to not quite be the case.

* * *

 

Sirens blare. People scream in the distance. Something jumps on you and you immediately freak the fuck out, shoving back as hard as you can and shrieking, “ _Get the fuck off of me get off mom get off me get off me!”_ in a smear of hysterical speech. Despite how loud you are, you can barely hear yourself over the deafening alarms.

Your wrists are being clamped above your head and when your eyes focus in the dark, it’s Fef on top of you. For a moment, you think that this is it, the worst has happened and she’s gone and you’ll soon be gone with her but then she says, “Eridan, it’s _me_ , you’re okay! The walls have been breached and part of the Dallas mob is moving in and they need shooters, we have to go.” 

Lucidity returns to you enough to question, “ _We_?”

“Yes, both of us, don’t you dare argue,” she snaps, and you just swallow and nod. She lets go of your wrists and you get up just in time for the owner of the house (Dirk, you think his name is) to sweep into the room with a fucking _katana_.

He stops to spare a quick glance at you as he grabs his car keys off a hook by the front door. “You two coming?”

“We need to grab our guns from Karkat’s car,” Fef responds, and Dirk tosses her Kar’s keys from the rack. You follow him outside, pausing only to slip your shoes on without socks. Fef gets her flats on before you, and she goes and gets your weapons—guns and melee alike, plus boxes of ammunition—and throws you the keys to put back inside. When you return, she’s got two kinds of shotguns, so you have to sit in the backseat. She hands you your rifle as Dirk flies out of the driveway.

He seems to know exactly where to go. You start seeing zombies within a mile of the house, and you and Fef lean out the windows with pitchforks to smack any that are too close to the car. You’re still in a residential area, and gunshots startling them there wouldn’t be good for the people cowering in their homes.

Soon, you reach what is your supposed destination: an apartment building with a large arrow spray-painted on the brick wall next to the fire escape, pointing upward. There’s a group of about fifteen undead keeping you from the base, and someone is on the lowest level of the fire escape, keeping the ladder up until someone comes along. When she catches sight of you, Dirk signals for you to get out of the car, and all three of you do so slowly. It looks like you’re going to have to take some zombies out to get over there, which should be all right since you can hear gunfire from the roof.

As you raise your rifle, Dirk’s hand pushes it down. “Not yet,” he mutters as he raises his katana and starts creeping towards the building.

Fef swipes her other pitchfork from your hand. “I’m much better with them, and you fire better with two hands,” she explains before pushing you forward. “Go in the middle of us, and then help with the ladder when we get over there.”

You’re surprisingly obedient. Once the zombies notice your group, you have to duck out of the way of Dirk’s sword on multiple occasions but you don’t really mind since watching him fight is a treat. He fights like he’s in an anime, all flashy but effective moves and incredible force and grace. You’ve read descriptions of swordfighters that say they’re like deadly dancers, full of lethal grace and immense strength, and you can’t help but agree.

Before you know it, you’re grabbing onto the ladder that the woman on the fire escape is pushing down to you and shoving Fef up it the second it’s on the ground. You go next as Dirk covers your back and then he’s following. You think he’s going down when one of them grabs his ankle, but the woman has a weapon long enough to reach down and stab the zombie in the neck. You think it’s one of those long pole saws used to trim trees.

The climb to the top isn’t very long, as the building is only four stories high. Getting to the top reveals about fifty people, all with guns except for one guy with a crossbow, and Dirk runs off to talk to some guy dual wielding pistols, leaving you two alone.

“Come on, there are spaces over there,” you say, pointing to the edge of the building directly across from you. Fef nods, and you jog over there only to look over the edge and almost fall to your knees.

It’s hard to find words for what you’re witnessing below. For as far as you can see, there’s an ocean of the dead, making the mob by the sports complex in Tallahassee look like a puddle. Even though the gunfire is constant, the people on top of this building aren’t enough to save the town, you know already. Sure, there are other people on other rooftops in other areas, but you don’t think there’s enough ammunition in the world to knock down a mob this big. 

“We have to try,” Fef declares as if she was reading your mind. “We have to try.” She’s always been braver than you, and that’s obvious by the way she raises her gun to her shoulder with nothing but determination on her face and fires into the crowd.

One zombie drops; millions more take its place. Gulping, you raise your rifle and start firing. And firing. And firing.

They will never stop coming. For as long as Earth exists, they will always come. Something in the depths of your mind whispers that they were already here.

An immeasurable amount of time later, the sky starts to lighten slightly, preparing for dawn. Despite the “it’s always darkest before the dawn” saying, it doesn’t look like anything but the sky is going to get lighter any time soon. Fef ran out of shells a long time ago, but she found someone with an extra pistol and is still standing next to you, as firm as she was at the beginning.

Just as you clip your last magazine into place, someone yells that zombies managed to get inside the building and are coming up the stairs.

You want nothing more than for this to be over.

Fef volunteers to go with the group to go secure the front doors. Dirk is already heading down and two or three others follow but when she starts to, you grab her hand, a lump in your throat keeping you from speaking.

“Say something against me going,” she says, and her voice is deadly. The rest of the world stops, and you can’t hear the gunfire or screams (and if you survive the day, you’re almost sure that you’re hearing is going to be damaged from how fucking _loud_ it all actually is), but you can sense every breath she takes and her voice is the strongest thing in the world. She’s made her mind up, and that might be a good thing because you hear the fire escape starting to rattle even though no one else has arrived in hours. “I dare you.”

Gulping, you just grasp her hand tighter and follow her to the door.

The lights in the building are out, save for the emergency ones near exits. You have to let go of her hand in order to grope for railings of stairs and feel the walls to make sure you’re not going to fall. You can hear gunshots echoing down the halls from downstairs, and in the lulls between shots the scratching and moaning of the undead army makes you feel physically ill. It disgusts you how much your hands are trembling as they clutch your rifle, and you want nothing more to drop on the ground, curl up in a ball, and sob until everything is okay again, but that’s not how shit gets done and if Fef isn’t afraid then you shouldn’t be.

_But you are. You’re so fucking terrified._

Somehow, the first zombie you see comes from behind you. Swinging your rifle around, you shoot. You turn back and continue down the hall without checking to see if your hit landed. Fef checks, though, and then she’s shooting her pistol at close range and getting a headshot.

You’re a marksman. You have hit targets 700 meters away while shooting with your dad, and you are cocky because you have the skill the back it up. Shooting at things is what you’re best at, and you should be in your element right now. But you just _completely_ missed a shot at a target that was only fifteen feet away. 

Fef seems to _really_ look at you. You wait for the disappointment, for the anger that’s sure to come. But she surges forward, hugging you tightly and murmuring into your ear, “Eridan, come on, it’s fine. We’re going to be _fine_. Please don’t panic, _please_ , just focus and come with me.” She pulls back a bit to kiss your cheek, right where a salty raindrop or something had hit you.

Somehow, you make yourself follow her. The gunshots in front of you have stopped, and the zombies have only gotten louder. As you reach the second floor, you finally meet the horde.

You shoot until your magazine is nearly empty and get headshots every time. They’re right down the hall from you so at this range, it’s _easy_ , even with your hands shaking and your mind only slightly clearer than it was. While you were both shooting, you managed to gain about ten feet of territory back, but now all you can do is retreat, running back up the stairs because now Fef is out of ammo too and—

 _No_.

Blocking your retreat is another horde, and before your mind completely processes that you’re throwing yourself at apartment doors, trying to find one that’s unlocked. Feferi is doing the same thing on the other side of the hallway to no avail as both groups stumble towards you. You’re going to die you’re going to die you’re going to—

“ _Here_!”

You barely hear yourself shriek the word, but before you know it you’re tumbling to the ground of an unlocked apartment and Fef is barreling in after you, locking the door and sliding down against it. Mere seconds later, the dead are there, pounding hard enough to make her body vibrate as she presses back against it.

But that’s okay, because you made it into an apartment, and apartments have windows and fire escapes and other rooms with lockable doors and sometimes even weapons…

You look around in the dim light, and your stomach drops. This _isn’t_ an apartment; it’s a small, windowless mailroom. The box for apartment 326 is right in front of you, though it isn’t the only thing staring your right in the face. A chill goes down your spine, and you can barely pull yourself off the ground from how badly you’re shaking. Someone is repeating “ _Oh, God_ ,” over and over and over again, and you really want to tell him to _shut the fuck up_ but you _can’t_ because the speaker is you.

“Eridan,” Fef says, and the room quivers. You feel it vibrate to your very core, and you can barely bring yourself to look her in the eye even though you know she wants your attention. “Eridan, _please_ calm down. _Think_.” The room shakes again, as if the mob is moving as one and is stomping hard enough to emanate an atom bomb. You feel like you can hear everything, from the scrape of the horde’s nails against the door and the people on the roof two floors above shouting and the mailboxes rattling and it’s all so overwhelming that you’re going to be crushed by it.

The only thing you don’t hear is the gunshot, but you feel the recoil of your rifle. 

Two shots. You always save two shots, and you just used the first one. It was impossible to miss the target this time.

 _She didn’t feel a thing,_ you tell yourself. Her finger twitching is a result of the building’s periodic shaking. It was an easy death, a peaceful one. The choking noise in her throat is the final exhale as her muscles relax, her _postremum spiritum_. The hole you put straight through her chest hit its mark perfectly, and the mob of undead cannot touch her. _She didn’t feel a thing._  

The door is on the verge of collapse, and you know they’ll be in here any second. Turning the gun around, you hold it awkwardly, letting your jaw lift so the barrel is caught between your teeth. You inhale a final time, and… 

You try to pull the trigger, but the gun _has_ to be jammed because you’re not being shot. A bullet isn’t exiting the back of your head. It can’t be your cowardice holding you back, because you loved Fef more than you ever loved yourself and you shot her without a second thought and you _can’t_

_pull_

_the_

_trigger._

People call out, but they’re miles away and you can’t make out the words, not through the cacophony of the horde finally breaking through the door. Once they’re in, you’re tripping backwards and dropping your gun so you can get back to the corner even though you can’t get up and you hear the tearing of flesh that’s not yours and front of the room is getting redecorated in red and at least she’s not alive for it because you _saved_ her.

You saved her but don’t have the courage to save yourself.

Some finally notice you scrambling back and lunge. They tear at you with decaying fingers and gaping maws, looking more terrifying than any monsters in a horror movie because they look so _human_. The bites are quick, and you never had a chance. Not to get out, not to die on your own terms, and certainly not for a cure. Mercy is for the righteous.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Before my final ramble, let me make this clear: I do not condone what Eridan did in the end. It was not romantic, and it was not fair or just; what Feferi wanted to do with her life was her decision, and Eridan had no right to kill her without her permission. There was a chance they would've just ended up committing suicide anyway, but he took her choice away from her, which wasn't a good thing to do. It's true that he was having a panic attack and wasn't thinking straight, plus he was practically going mad, but while this explains his actions, it doesn't excuse them.
> 
> Also, keep in mind that Eridan is an unreliable narrator. What was going on in his head wasn't actually what was happening 100% of the time; it was just how he was comprehending it. If you can figure out what was going on outside, the story might get even sadder. I left hints.
> 
> But... this is it. Though this final installment wasn't as hard for me to write as the third chapter (though it was certainly the most emotionally draining thing I've written thus far, and the hardest thing for me to find correct words and descriptions for), I'm sorry if some of it turned out to be shit. If you have any final questions or comments, you can find me at redweddingcrashers.tumblr.com. I'll be posting a new fic tomorrow, and it's the one that I've been meaning to get up all along. _Finally._ It's going to be a **long** one.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed _Hopeless Wanderers_ , and even if you didn't, thank you very much for reading!


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